Pingry Headmaster Plans to Move to 'Greener' Pastures

Every king deserves a castle and the headmaster of The Pingry School, a K-12 private, non-boarding college preparatory school, needs a new home. 

Headmaster Nathaniel Conard currently resides at the 4,000 square foot headmaster's house located on the elementary school campus in Short Hills. 

Grades 6 through 12 are taught on a campus in Bernards Township. Conard believes that living on the same campus as the older students will allow him to interact with the students in a more social way. 

Despite the fact that the building will be a single-family home, the project was brought in front of the Planning Board on June 22 because it will be located on the Pingry campus, and thus is considered an accessory structure to the school.  

Roger Maynard, the attorney who was representing Pingry, informed the board that the home will be 6,000 square feet with an accompanying detached barn and greenhouse. 

The 190-acre campus in Bernards Township has become increasingly more "green" over the years, Maynard explained, and this new construction will fit into that ideal by being environmentally friendly. Energy conservation on Pingry's campus began in the late 1990s and the school has cut energy use by 42 percent.

Not only will the home be built with the highest efficiency building materials, windows and insulation, there will also be solar panels on the roof and geothermal heating and cooling. Rainwater will also be harvested for reuse in irrigation and toilet flushing throughout the structure.

The project has been submitted for LEED Platinum Certification. LEED is a global green building certification system created by the United States Green Building Council that measures the sustainability and energy efficiency of a construction. 

"We feel that it is a model project for the township and for Pingry as well," Maynard told the board. "So this is a substantial home but one with a very, very small footprint from an environmental standpoint. And that really is in keeping with the mission of the school." 

The home was designed to house certain school functions that require a more intimate setting such as alumni dinners or a reunion cocktail party, and at times hold larger events in the backyard under a tent, such as the senior barbeque. 

While Maynard and Conard kept insisting the true purpose of the home was to be a single-family residence, board member Kevin Orr felt they were being "disingenuous" considering the blueprints indicate both ladies and men's facilities on the first floor. 

If the building was to be used as a venue of sorts, the Planning Board was insistent that more parking should be established. Another suggestion was to build a driveway to the home coming from the direction of the campus instead of off Martinsville Road.

Conard assured the board that big events would continue to occur on the Bernards Township campus, which has over 300 parking spaces. Therefore, the Director of Facilities, Michael Vizri, felt that no more parking was necessary.

Vizri told the board that in order to get to the headmaster's house, visitors could park on the campus and walk to the home on a cross-country trail through the woods. This notion seemed illogical to the Planning Board and they felt that a proper access way should be designed by the engineer. 

Maynard had planned on getting approval from the Planning Board by the end of the meeting, but after a lengthy and detailed explanation from witnesses it was decided that more "energy" should have gone into structuring a parking area and access route to the home. 

After revisions are made the Planning Board will meet with The Pingry School about this project again.