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Little Green Homes Increasingly Popular

Published Friday Nov 7, 2014

Author MICHAEL MCCORD

A recent trend in sustainable housing is also one of the most obvious – building smaller from the beginning.

A case in point is a recently completed home on Kittery Point designed and built by Greenland-based Little Green Homes. “The family had a home in Portsmouth but they wanted to downsize quite a bit,” said Jeff Stacy, business partner at Little Green Homes.

Late in 2013, the Portsmouth couple approached Stacy and fellow business partner Chris Redmond with their vision and goals for their new home for the two-adult, one-child family. The result is a comfortable two-story, two-bedroom home totaling 1,150 square feet built with as much recycled and reused material as possible – which included parts from an old barn.

The new structure has a cupola, sliding glass door for a wide natural view, and a durable metal roof. It also maximizes space utility and leverages insulation to create a comfortable, energy efficient home.

“They (the family) were big part of the collaboration and it was exciting to bring their ideas to life,” Stacy said. “Part of their goal was to simplify and they are very happy with the outcome.” Construction began in the spring and the home was ready to occupy in early August.

“We haven’t had the opportunity to build a house like this,” he said. “The homeowners had so many original ideas and details to incorporate like reclaimed barn boards walls, built-ins and a suspended cargo net that doubles as a family size hammock, to name a few, and it was a challenge budget-wise to pull it all together, but it was an exciting project and a cool experience.”

Since its founding in 2007, Little Green Homes has lived up to its name in dozens of projects in the greater NH and Southeastern Seacoast region. Redmond is the design guru and Stacy handles the building side of their partnership in a company with six employees. In 2009, Little Green Homes constructed in Portsmouth the state’s first owner-financed Platinum LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) home and 28th in the country. And the company has barely caught its breath since then due to growing consumer awareness about the long-term values of sustainable construction and remodeling.

Stacy said the marketplace has caught up with the company’s core values of building smaller and more sustainable homes. “We are busier than we have ever been and booked into the winter and beyond,” Stacy said. “We are blown away by the volume of requests and how sustainably imaginative our clients have become.”

More Seacoast region and beyond consumers have been drawn to the specialization in residential projects that maximize energy efficiency, health, and durability. Stacy says Little Green Homes has fine-tuned an integrated design-build process to help clients meet all of their goals efficiently, sustainably and cost effectively.

“We are seeing a great variety in the project size of our work, from smaller requests to large scale,” Stacy said.

For example, Little Green Homes completed a timber frame screen porch with new windows for a home in Durham and has started a new home in Derry. It is also rehabbing a 19th Century, 2,000 square-foot, Colonial-style home in Exeter. “We are reinsulating the house and it’s going to change the way it functions,” Stacy said. “It’s going to be very energy efficient, durable and with much lower maintenance costs.”

Little Green Homes is a green-certified business member of the Green Alliance, a Portsmouth organization representing more than 100 local green businesses, along with nearly 4,000 consumer members. 

Stacy said the “green” tag is no longer an outlier designation and the real market experience for a growing majority of consumers has eroded the myth of green as too expensive for average homeowners. “We believed from the beginning that people would get it and they have gotten the message,” he said. “No one wants to pay higher energy prices than they should. Our goal has always been to build houses for clients that we would want to live in.”

Find out more about Little Green Homes at http://littlegreenhomes.com.

Learn about the Green Alliance at http://www.greenalliance.biz.

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