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The new 90,000 square-foot Gaia Napa Valley Hotel, owned by Butterfly
Effect, is the first hotel in the U.S. to achieve a LEED Gold rating.
It was certified under the LEED for New Construction v2.1 rating
system. The hotel has a guest room lodge, a reception building,
and a conference center containing meeting rooms, a kitchen, and
banquet room. A stormwater management plan has been implemented
to reduce the impact on the community stormwater system and improve
the performance over that of pre-development conditions. Roof surface
water is collected and diverted to a central lagoon and then used
to irrigate courtyard landscaping. The frontage of the entire site,
exclusive of the entry drive, has been reconfigured into a series
of bioswales and berms with an underdrain system and additional
storage capacity, so that virtually no runoff leaves the site. Water
conservation is achieved through efficient plumbing fixtures and
irrigation systems that collectively reduce water consumption by
more than 40%. The project is estimated to have energy savings of
24.9% beyond ASHRAE 90.1-1999 (and California's Title 24 requirements)
and it has a solar array that supplies 10.12% of the electrical
demand. As further evidence of Gaia Hotel's commitment to cutting-edge
design strategies, the project has developed a green building educational
outreach program, a green cleaning program that includes training
for maintenance staff, and a landscape maintenance program that
calls for the use of organic rather than synthetic fertilizers.
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