Photo by Craig Macaluso

August 2011. Off the Grid in Prairie Laurent: Tony Adrian and Marie Bossard

It’s been seven years since Tony Adrian and Marie Bossard moved into their green house on 175 acres in the Prairie Laurent community near Breaux Bridge. Their expenses for utilities have been zero. Imagine. No electric bills. No water bills.

Yes, the Adrian-Bossard house is indeed a genuine green house. “Today we have 4.2 kilowatts of solar power and a reserve of six thousand gallons of water,” Tony says with pride. “We’ve never come closer than three weeks to using our reserve of water, and the only addition we’ve made is to add another solar panel to generate the power for a chest freezer we added to preserve some of our homegrown fruits and vegetables.”

The only other addition onsite has been a 20-by-40 open sided building for parking tractors and to allow for the use of the portable sawmill in the shade.  “It was constructed from salvaged greenhouse trusses, oilfield pipe, and used metal roofing from a building damaged by Hurricane Gustav,” he explains. No stranger to using recycled materials as much as possible, Adrian still rhapsodizes about the stilts that hold up the main floor of the house; he considers it all a work of art. “It was fashioned from scavenged scrap oilfield pipe,” he says as he walks around pointing out what he considers the finer points of his home.

Architect Edward Cazayoux, fellow in the American Institute of Architects and former director of the School of Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, designed the house. “He enjoyed pushing the envelope of creating a home that is truly self sustaining,” says Adrian, a registered nurse and owner with Bossard of Nursing Data Inc. “I am a great admirer of Eddie and we speak by e-mail fairly often and a few times a year on the phone or in person.”

Unique features of the Prairie Laurent house include an eight-foot-wide porch that wraps the house and the pecan floors that Adrian milled from trees that were felled by Hurricane Lili. The house was designed with large windows and French doors for cross ventilation. “You can’t imagine what a wonderful breeze we have when all of the windows are open,” explains Bossard, a native of France. They met in 1990 when she visited the area for Festival International de Louisiane. Bossard was living in Baton Rouge at the time and teaching French for CODOFIL (Council for the Development of French in Louisiana).

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