For the high-profile crowd that turned out to celebrate a new home in Venice, California, the attraction wasn’t just the company and the architectural detail. The house boasted the builders’ equivalent of a three-star Michelin rating: a LEED platinum certificate.
The actors John Cusack and Pierce Brosnan, with his wife, the journalist Keely Shaye Smith, came last fall to see a house that the builders promised would “emit no harmful gases into the atmosphere,” “produce its own energy” and incorporate recycled materials, from concrete to countertops.
Behind the scenes were Tom Schey, a homebuilder in Santa Monica, and his business partner, Kelly Meyer, an environmentalist whose husband Ron is the president of Universal Studios. Meyer said their goal was to show that something energy-conscious “doesn’t have to look as if you got it off the bottom shelf of a health-food store.”
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
“It doesn’t have to smell like hemp,” she said.
That was probably a good thing. The four-bedroom house was for sale, with a US$2.8 million asking price.
Its rating was built into that price. LEED — an acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is the hot designer label, and platinum is the badge of honor — the top classification given by the US Green Building Council. “There’s kind of a green pride, like driving a Prius,” said Brenden McEneaney, a green building adviser to the city of Santa Monica, adding, “It’s spreading all over the place.”
Devised eight years ago for the commercial arena, the ratings now cover everything from schools to retail interiors. But homes are the new frontier.
While there are other widely recognized ratings, like the federal Energy Star for appliances, the LEED brand stands apart because of its four-level rankings — certified, silver, gold and platinum — and third-party verification. So far this year, 10,250 new home projects have registered for the council’s consideration, compared with 3,100 in 2006, the first year of the pilot home-rating system. Custom-built homes dominate the first batch of certified dwellings. Today, dinner-party bragging rights are likely to include: “Let me tell you about my tankless hot water heater.”
But if a platinum ranking is a Prada label for some, for others, it is a prickly hair shirt. Try asking buyers used to conspicuous consumption (a 1,115m² house) to embrace conspicuous nonconsumption (say, 223m² for a small family). Or to earn points by recycling and weighing all their construction debris (be warned: a bathroom scale probably won’t cut it). The imperatives of comfort and eco-friendliness are not always in synch.
The ratings are now woven into building codes in Los Angeles, Boston and Dallas. The federal government and many states and cities use LEED standards or the equivalent for their own buildings. The system is based on points earned for a variety of eco-friendly practices; builders choose among them, balancing the goals of cost control, design and high point totals.
Nevada, North Carolina and Virginia, not to mention Chicago, Cincinnati and Bar Harbor, Maine, give tax incentives or other concessions, like expedited permitting or utility hookups, for construction that is up to the nonprofit council’s standards.
And “LEED-accredited professional” is a new occupational status.
Worries about climate change and rising energy costs are part of the equation: roughly 21 percent of heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions come from homes; nearly 40 percent come from residential and commercial structures combined. As energy prices rise, the long-range economic value and short-range social cachet of green building are converging.
More than 1,500 commercial buildings and 684 homes have been certified but just 48 homes have received the platinum ranking, among them a four-bedroom home in Freeport, Maine, as well as homes in Minneapolis; Callaway, Florida; Dexter, Michigan; and Paterson, New Jersey. The checklist for certification can be more daunting than a private-school application, which prompts many to abandon the quest. Schey is not seeking LEED certification on his next home (though the project’s architect, Melinda Gray, is seeking it for hers).
The organization charges from US$400 for a home to US$22,500 for the largest buildings to register and certify costs.
Joel McKellar, a researcher with an architecture firm in Charleston, South Carolina, said that to earn credit for adequate natural light, “you have to calculate the area of the room, the area of the windows, how much visible transmittance of light there is.”
Michael Lehrer, who designed the platinum-rated Water (PLUS) Life Museum complex in Hemet, outside Los Angeles, said, “They have mundane things in there that are pretty nonsensical and others things that are pretty profound,” adding, “At a time when everybody and their sister and brother are saying ‘We are green,’ it’s very important that these things be vetted in a credible way.”
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