Airbnb spa retreat house under construction in Ann Arbor neighborhood

ANN ARBOR, MI — A new house is under construction on Bydding Road in Ann Arbor’s Water Hill neighborhood, but it’s not going to be just any ordinary home.

It’s going to be an Airbnb spa retreat, said Doug Selby, a partner with Meadowlark Builders, the company building the structure for owner Peter Woolf.

“It will be a spa that people can rent and also a lot of different educational opportunities as part of the retreat space,” Selby said, noting plans for “living walls” with plants growing in the back and a huge cistern to collect rainwater for multiple uses.

The project has turned heads in the neighborhood as the building is taking shape with extra-thick insulation blocks for walls, which one observer said looked like big foam Legos.

It’s known as an ICF or insulated concrete form structure, Selby said, saying that will make a big difference in terms of thermal insulation for what aims to be a net-zero building.

“I believe it will be zero energy, which is very difficult when you’re heating water for saunas and steam baths and pools,” he said.

Woolf said he plans to live in the house and also operate it as a short-term rental property. The city allows new short-term rentals in neighborhoods as long as the home is owner-occupied.

“It’ll have three suites on the upper floor and then the lower one is like a one-bedroom apartment and that’s where I will be,” said Woolf, who also owns the house next door that he uses as an office.

The project is called Winter Garden. It’s a scaled-back, residential version of a commercial bath house development Woolf proposed several years ago on North Main Street. Two old houses were torn down to make way for the previous development, though it never came to fruition.

Woolf said he’s taking what he learned from that and putting it into Winter Garden, working with Brian Burkett of Aspire Architecture, Erik Majcher of Atlantes Design and others.

A former University of Michigan chemical engineering professor, Woolf purchased the property at 1113 Bydding Road in 2020 for $285,000 and tore down a small house that stood where the new spa retreat is rising.

One of the building features is a 60,000-gallon cistern designed to collect rain from the roof and act as a pond and huge thermal battery, while providing water for irrigation and toilet flushing. By storing heat in the water, it can be equal to about 120 Tesla Powerwalls, Woolf said.

“About a quarter of the building is water storage,” Woolf said, noting a greenhouse on top of the cistern will double as a large solar thermal capture structure.

“We can push or pull heat from that water reserve and use that to condition the house, the energy from that, and so that becomes our thermal battery,” he said.

For a pond in the greenhouse, rain will be filtered so it’s super clean and it will be like a large fountain, Woolf said.

There will be an attached sauna on the side of the building that can be powered by a wood-burning stove and heat will be collected and redirected back into the cistern, he said. There also will be a heat pump on the outside.

The plans also include an 18-kilowatt rooftop solar panel array with a backup battery system to ride out power outages.

There will be other rainwater collection systems on the property for rain that doesn’t land on the building, paired with sustainable plantings, Woolf said, crediting landscape architect Shannan Gibb-Randall of InSite Design Studio.

Mentioning several other sustainability features, Woolf said he’s trying to minimize the building’s carbon footprint and it will be very different from a normal building.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said, adding it’s been his dream for years to do something like this.

By allowing people to rent it out, it will let others experience “deep sustainability” firsthand, he said.

The building is expected to take about 18 months to complete and Woolf said rental rates will be decided then.

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