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WBM january 2011
and knocking walls down and ripping
things out.”
Toatlly disconnected from the
mainland, they created a self-sufficient
vacation home, powered by a 12-volt
electrical system charged by photovol-taic
panels and a wind generator, with
rain-water harvesting, natural ventila-tion
and day-lighting. Adding boat
slips and a pool, they turned the house
into a destination rental.
In 2000, the ribbon was cut on three
more significant designs. One was the
city of Wilmington’s Market Street
fire station. For that, DeChesere bor-rowed
elements of the county’s historic
structures, notably the bell tower from
the Third Street courthouse. And two
more landmarks — the Core Sound
Waterfowl Museum and Heritage
Center on Harkers Island and the
Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum on
Hatteras Island — were also innovative
designs created during this decade.
“A lot of our work focused on the
coast — all of these unique kinds of
projects that you don’t find other
people doing. The projects we did
were more diverse and still focused on
design and became the projects that
were battered by the wind and waves
of the ocean, so we became experts in
that,” DeChesere says.
One last project — the Bald Head
Island Barrier Island Study Center, a
6,000-square-foot education facility
for the study of barrier island systems,
maritime forest ecology and habitat,
and sustainable green building tech-niques
for prospective home builders
— was designed for sustainable green
building products and methods (and
later retooled for platinum LED cer-tification)
and earned a Lower Cape
Fear Stewardship Design Significant
Achievement Award in 2008 without
breaking ground. For years, the project
was in limbo waiting for funding.
But, in actuality, there would be
two final projects opening up two
separate pathways that would converge
at one point, immutably altering the
trajectory of DeChesere’s career and,