The House That Green Built

To illustrate the confounding nature of green building, Lindsay Suter, a Connecticut architect, likes to start with a question: Between a stone and plastic foam insulation, which one is green?

In Westchester, Stephen Tilly, left, checks plans with Michael DiSisto at the Dobbs Ferry house where foam insulation and floor heating are being installed.

“You’ll go, ‘Of course, Lindsay, the stone is a natural product,’ ” said Mr. Suter, who was trained at the Yale School of Architecture, where he now teaches part time.

But it’s the context and the big picture, he said. Sure, the insulation may be a petrochemical. But the stone may be tumbled Brazilian marble that in shipping would have used a great deal of fuel. The insulation, he said, “will pay you back year after year after heating season after heating season after cooling season with the benefits of its performance.”

“Is it perfect? No,” he said. “Is the stone perfect? No. But in many cases these are the deals with the devil that we make.”

In the world of green homebuilding, such compromises are plentiful.

Across the region, as in the rest of the country, green homebuilding is growing, but remains a largely uncharted and unregulated morass of guidelines, incentives, programs, products and philosophies that can frustrate even the most intrepid and environmentally aware homeowner. In the absence of federal mandates, it has evolved from the bottom up, with different groups and occasionally states providing overlapping direction.

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