Bringing Green Mainstream

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Using the grill atop the stove saves on washing pots and pans, and the IceStone countertops glint with recycled glass and other materials.

Sensing that few potential home buyers walk into a house to check out its attic insulation, the GreenHome's builders instead focused on the things they thought a buyer would care about. The floors throughout the main hall, living room, and dining room are made of richly colored reclaimed hardwood flooring. A North Carolina company called Cape Fear Riverwood makes the floors from logs pulled up from the bottom of the Cape Fear River, the watery graveyard of decades past when the river was lined with mill towns. In the living room, pocket doors, molding, and elaborate built-in shelving took great effort to develop to sustainable standards, but seemed mandatory to compete in a market where they are standard to new construction. GreenHome reused discarded glass and wood, and employed materials, including finishes, with low levels of "off gassing." That means the air quality is better from the moment of installation and over the life of the home because there are far fewer VOCs (volatile organic compounds). A closet on the first floor is made from "responsible" hardwood plywood, built especially for the house by a company called Closets by Design, which has since decided to launch it as a whole new business line.

Naturally, all of this costs money. Cherokee has a team of students at the University of North Carolina's business school study the payoff. So far, the residents of the house, one of Darden's staffers, his wife, and their four children, are using 71% less electricity than families in comparable homes, and spending far less on heating and cooling. Those 80,000 gallons of water per year will be saved through conservation methods including using recycled rainwater for flushing toilets and washing machines. When the family doesn't need all the electricity they're making in the house, they can sell the excess to the regional grid.

A Growing Sector

For now, the GreenHome remains at the cutting edge. But forecasts predict that green building in the residential sector will grow from a $7.4 billion business in 2005 to a $38 billion one by 2010. Green home projects in other states have sold for a nice premium—as much as 25% above the local market, while the average construction cost increase of using green materials was just 4%. But, Cherokee chief Darden isn't banking on builders replicating the GreenHome en masse. He thinks corporations and multifamily landlords are more likely to embrace green technologies first since they can more easily focus on the payback in energy savings over the long term. The typical homeowner is more caught up in the monthly mortgage payment than a return that might take 5 to 10 years to materialize.

With the GreenHome, then, Cherokee is "trying to advance the state of the art and stay closely connected to what technologies are available," says Darden. He also aims "to maintain our knowledge about green building issues so we can be articulate" when pushing builders at other sites to use green technologies.

Byrnes is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York .