Eco show homes
Photo: Visitors explore the back yard of the Wired LivingHome in Los Angeles. The $4 million prefabricated house has an automated energy system.
Photo: Wired magazine was a sponsor of the Wired LivingHome. The eco-conscious house’s goal was to show green as high-tech, not hippie.
The New York Times photos by Stephanie Diani
NEW YORK
When actors Alysia Reiner and David Alan Basche embarked on a renovation of their four-story, 5,000-square-foot row house in Harlem two years ago, they did not intend for it to become a show house. But a chance meeting with Michela O’Connor Abrams, the president and publisher of Dwell magazine, led to a Web chronicle of the job on dwell.com, and turned the renovation into a marketing vehicle for manufacturers of environmentally conscious products and a chance for the couple to evangelize on green building.
In Web videos seen by some 268,000 viewers, according to Dwell, Basche, who played Todd Beamer in the film “United 93,” installs radiant floor heating to save money, as Reiner recaps how she picked through metal, wood and Sheetrock refuse from the demolition — which Basche did himself — to recycle it. During an open house sponsored by Dwell last year, 700 people toured the home, learning about its native plant garden and walls coated in plaster made from recycled marble dust and pulverized seashells.
“The building of our home became an opportunity to teach,” said Reiner. “When you build a house, you learn so much that you never get to use again.”
In letting their home function as both a laboratory and a marketing device, Reiner and Basche, it turns out, are not unique. Green show houses, sponsored by magazines, nonprofit groups and developers, are appearing across the country, spreading a message about environmentally conscious building to designers, builders and home buyers, and helping to sell building products.
Environmentalism may turn out to be the biggest thing to hit the construction industry since aluminum siding. By 2012, green building could be a $20 billion business, up from roughly $2 billion, according to a National Association of Home Builders’/McGraw Hill market forecast. But some builders are unfamiliar with the new materials and how to use them. And buyers may not know enough about them to request them.
“We read about it, we hear about it, but nobody’s really telling us how to do it,” said Greg Olson, a former contractor who develops the curriculum for continuing education courses, including a class on green building, at Kaplan Professional Schools in St. Paul, Minn.
\ Changing behavior
Creators of the new show houses hope that their projects will showcase practices that support the basic tenets of green building: clean indoor air, energy and water efficiency, and recycled or locally produced materials.
“Changing the behavior of one builder is quite honestly changing the behavior of dozens of home buyers,” said Dana Bres, a research …