AURORA - Linda Martin looks forward to the coming days.

Her retirement home with husband, Rick, on the eastern slope of Cayuga Lake is close to being completed. Soon, the most important thing on her to-do list will be planning a meal with items from her one-acre organic garden and from the pantry off her elegant kitchen in the middle of her underground home.

For several years, Martin, a wiry woman with a musical laugh, has worked ceaselessly with craftsmen in the construction of a Route 90 home she designed herself to be energy-efficient, effective for daily living and serene in spirit.

The house maintains a 54 degree temperature year-round because of the five feet of earth on its roof. The earth's natural thermal flywheel effect of gaining heat slowly over the summer and losing heat slowly over the winter results in a year-round reasonable temperature even without additional heating sources. The home was constructed with a conventional post-and-beam frame, but reinforced concrete columns, like the type of construction in parking garages, support the weight of the soil above.

An underground home does not mean an underground cave or a hobbit's hole. From the outside, it does look unconventional to see a two-door garage and massive picture windows topped by soil, but the interior is elegant and conscientiously planned. At its simplest, its a strong building that can withstand tornadoes or other major storms. Construction began in May 2000.

These last six years of work have been for an altruistic purpose, Martin said: the goal of leaving a home that will last for generations to come and be worthy of lasting that long.

“This house is not just to save the earth's energy but also to save my energy and whoever else lives here,” said Martin, during a tour of her home last week. “This home should last 1,000, 1,500 years.”

She first became interested in the idea of constructing an underground home, also called earth-sheltered architecture, in the late 1960s when she saw a program with Malcolm Wells, an architect who began designing underground buildings in 1964.

When she and her husband decided to build their retirement home, he left the design up to her. The result is a massive space with 11 rooms and an unconventional structure that is decidedly in the minority of ways to build homes. Wells' Web site estimates there are only 3,000 to 4,000 earth buildings in the United States.

The home is powered by the sun and wind resources of its vicinity rather than coal or petroleum products extracted hundreds of miles away from below the earth's surface. A 115-foot windmill provides 80 percent of the home's energy. The additional 20 percent comes from a bank of solar panels that face south.

The home has two backup forms of energy, a diesel generator and a link to the NYSEG grid that provides them with clean hydroelectric power if it is a dark, windless season. Propane powers Martin's oven and other appliances, rather than using electrical-power appliances than rely on “electric that's really, really expensive and really ineffective.”

There is electrical lighting in the home for nighttime, but 19 SolaTube skylights that rise through the sod roof let in the natural daylight even on a cloudless day and each let in the equivalent of three to five 100-watt incandescent lights. Low-flush toilets and low-water use appliances also save on water use.

Martin's second major goal with the design of her house was for it to be comfortable and efficient for daily living. After living in 31 places during her life, including out of the country for a time, the former psychotherapist planned carefully to make it a perfect home to comfortably carry out regular chores.

“Eating, sleeping, cooking, laundry: if these things can be easier, it adds a dimension of joy to our lives,” Martin said.

The two wings of the house meet at a 45-degree angle in front of the kitchen, the center of the home. One wing houses the 1,400-square-foot garage in which Martin butchers a deer each fall, a study and a spare bedroom. The other wing houses the living room, den, two office spaces, the master bedroom and master bathroom. The house moves from the most public spaces to the most private.

One of the main design themes Martin pursued was one of universal design, which has the goal of making products and buildings usable by people with differing abilities as much as possible. Except for two steps leading up to the home's dining platform and steps leading to storage areas, the entire home is on one level.

There is a ramp at the front of the home which is not just for people in wheelchairs but kinder to human legs than steps, Martin said. All the doors are wide enough to accommodate someone in a wheelchair. There are no knobs on her kitchen cupboards and the walls are curved to eliminate corners that can be painful to knock into. The handicap-accessible shower became useful for her poodle Grover who used to fight baths in a tub out of claustrophobia but happily steps into the shower when he needs to be cleaned.

The kitchen floor is cork wood, which keeps the kitchen warm in the winter, cool in the summer and, most importantly, is forgiving on the feet year-round.

A center island is crowned with a butcher block counter from manufacturer John Boos and Company, of Effingham, Ill. The island is designed so Martin can sit at during kitchen chores. A sink at one end of the island makes washing produce or dishes a more comfortable affair.

She avoided having all of her kitchen walls stuffed with cupboards for easy accessibility to some of her cooking items; two cherry shelves are artfully arranged with crockery, gleaming pots and platters. Her pantry is huge to allow her to see in a sweeping glance every stored item: the microwave, the turkey baster, the bread and waffle maker, the jars of rice and beans, the white tea, the matzo balls and soup mix.

Martin described her interior decoration as “woodsy and natural and tribal.” But the ultimate goal was soothing flows of energy.

The home is spacious with 10-foot ceilings. The wood floor in most of the home's rooms is antique heart pine recycled from New Hampshire. Woolen oriental rugs break up the gleaming floor. Towering bookshelves in her book-lined study and placed in a couple of other rooms were rescued from the fate of a garbage container as a Hartford, Conn. law library was remodeling.

The dining room and the living room, with a chestnut leather couch that wraps around a glass coffee table with an orchid plant on top, share the same picture window looking down the property's slope to the span of Cayuga Lake. Her kitchen walls are cross-cut larch that reveal the rings of the trees they came from.

Off the master bedroom is a hot tub sitting on a deck made from ground plastic bottles and left-over cedar chips. The deck overlooks Martin's organic garden with an overflow of fava beans. She has 18 kinds of fruit trees and a nut orchard.

Finally, most of the work is done between Martin and the efforts of two craftsmen, Jerry Harringer and Ivan Farney. A window seat is still slated to be built in the study filled with Romance language dictionaries, do-it-yourself household and gardening books and histories of China. The front entryway needs to be finished. Flower herbs, like echinacea, still need to be planted on the roof. The washer and dryer must be moved from the house down the driveway that Martin and her husband lived in during the building of their underground house.

It took her two and a half years for find her dream property that hadn't been sprayed with pesticides for 10 years, had a view and had hills reminiscent of her Michigan upbringing. It even satisfied a childhood hope of a narrow property framed with gullies on both sides.

But the work of several years is drawing down. Pretty soon, the scope of her house project will be reduced to the simple pleasure of her love of gardening stemming from her love of eating.

“You know no distance between there and the pot,” she said.

The result, a home she and her husband saved for their entire lives, is something every person and the earth deserves, she said.

Staff writer Amaris Elliott-Engel can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 282 or at amaris.elliot-engel@lee.net