The popular image of an environmentally friendly home is stuck in the 1970s with dome-shaped houses and triangular windows. But today’s “green” homes look a lot like the place next door — complete with such extras as hardwood floors, Jacuzzis and air conditioning.
John and Betsy Hall McKinney spared little expense on their 4,400-square-foot custom home in Telluride, Colo., completed in December. But it wasn’t just the sauna and hot tub that pushed costs up to nearly $200 a square foot. Rather, it was environmental extras: solar systems for electricity and hot water; natural building materials such as straw-bale insulation, adobe floors and wool carpets. The house even has composting toilets that turn waste into fertilizer via a basement tank filled with wood chips and worms.
The McKinneys, who run a nonprofit organization for outdoor education, estimate that the eco-friendly features boosted their costs by about 20 percent. But like others who have opted to build their homes to minimize environmental impact, they think it’s worth it. “It’s like a little star in my moral conscience,” McKinney says. “When I flush the toilet or send scraps down the composter, I feel like I’m doing something important.”
Green building is no longer the province of the backwoods. More and more homes with environmentally correct features are surfacing in the mainstream, particularly as the costs for such features decline. According to David Johnston, an environmental-building consultant in Boulder, Colo., about 5 percent of the 1.5 million housing starts this year could probably qualify as green, with builders using more resource-efficient materials, such as recycled-newspaper insulation, engineered lumber made from wood fiber bonded with adhesives, and carpeting woven from recycled soda bottles.
Dennis Weaver, the actor best known as TV’s “McCloud,” calls home a 10,000-square-foot “Earthship” in Ridgeway, Colo. The $1 million adobe structure, built into a hillside using 3,000 tires and 300,000 tin cans, relies on mountain breezes for cooling and sunlight for heat and electricity. Nonetheless, Weaver says he is plenty cozy in the Southwestern-style home, which features such niceties as a waterfall cascading in the entryway and a silk-oak tree growing in the great room, without the aid of a planter. Earthships, a trademark of Solar Survival Architecture in Taos, N.M., have been around for 25 years, but are constantly evolving, says firm owner Michael Reynolds. Once affordable only to the super rich, prices have dropped to about $80 a square foot, and Reynolds is working to make it available to the masses. The design also passes building codes in most municipalities, he says.
As technologies for making these new materials improve, the cost of having a green home is coming down. Environmentally friendly features typically add only 5 percent — about the cost of a cabinet upgrade — to the price of building a home, says William Browning, founder of the Green Development Services group of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colo.
Indeed, the cost of many green materials is less than most people think: Carpets and synthetic-wood decking made of recycled plastic are no more expensive than their standard counterparts, while cellulose insulation made from recycled newspaper costs about 10 percent to 15 percent more than fiberglass, Johnston says. As a result, green materials are showing up in residential construction across the spectrum, from Habitat for Humanity’s starter homes to developers’ high-end custom models.
“This is not just a sociological phenomenon for old hippies; it’s a business trend,” says Johnston. “Builders are finding that people who consider themselves environmentalists are hungry for a way to demonstrate their concern.”
Pam White, an artist who lives in Chilmark, Mass., on Martha’s Vineyard, resides in a 2,200-square-foot, Cape Cod-style cottage built from salvaged lumber. The cypress exterior was pulled from Southern river bottoms, while exposed interior beams of Douglas fir were retrieved from a Maine industrial mill. Even the redwood-screen porch has a history: It came from the dismantled tanks of a California winery and a Rhode Island brewery. Cost: $400,000.
Still, unconventional building materials such as old tires, tin cans and straw bales remain at the fringe, says Peter Yost, program manager for environmental systems at the National Association of Home Builders Research Center. “You can’t go to the lumber yard and get straw bales,” Yost explains. “It comes down to familiarity, availability and, in some cases, code approval.”
In fact, the green-building push focuses on more-accepted substitutes for traditional materials. For example, in Denver the local home-builders chapter of the national association is conducting a program encouraging builders to use engineered lumber instead of wood framing, cement-based roofing instead of asphalt shingles and carpet tacks instead of glue.
The use of such materials translates into a more-conventional, eco-friendly home. That’s important to buyers like Joseph Gilmartin, a self-described “regular guy” who purchased a 2,700-square-foot green home in Grayslake, Ill., for $440,000 two years ago. The home, part of a low-density, conservation-minded community called Prairie Crossing, looks like a traditional Midwestern farmhouse. Few would notice that parts of Mr. Gilmartin’s house are constructed from lumber produced from recycled wood materials, without any toxic glues. There’s no sign of the super efficient mechanical systems, or the extra caulking and insulation that help keep utility bills down.
“I wanted to do something for the environment,” Gilmartin says. “But I didn’t want a straw house with sheep to trim the roof.”
