michelle kaufmann designs

We recently had an energy consumption study done to compare a Sunset Breezehouse’s energy usage to that of the national best selling design, which is what you might think of as a “traditional” home. The results were pretty interesting because they clearly showed just how much more energy efficient the Breezehouse is than a traditional home. But what’s more exciting to us is how we can use this data to communicate the benefits of a green home to homebuyers. By quantifying the advantages of a sustainably designed home we can express that information in universal, easy to understand terms using something as simple as a label (like the ones we created above and below) in the same way the advantages and disadvantages of food are expressed through nutrition labels.

There is no reason not to hold the houses in which we live to the same standards as the food we consume. However, while homes must be constructed according to certain standards and codes, there is no simple way for buyers to understand what they are literally stepping into when they choose to purchase and inhabit the final product. Right now, when we buy a home, we can only base our decision off things like location, visual appeal, and upfront costs. But these offer a picture of a house’s value that is far from holistic. Among other things, they exclude the very important factor of sustainability, a factor that is becoming more and more crucial in today’s world of decreasing oil reserves and increasing carbon emissions as well as other dire environmental threats.

Our traditional criteria also neglect the reality of the monthly costs of owning a home, which inevitably overlap the issue of sustainable design and are also far more germane than the upfront cost of a home for anyone who isn’t making their purchase with cash upfront. Yet another factor not given enough weight in our current decision making process is the healthfulness of a house’s interior space, despite the fact that, on average, we spend 80 to 90 percent of our time indoors in this country.

Homebuyers need more information about the homes they are buying when they are buying. There should be a way for them to have easy access to information like how efficiently a home will use energy and water, how healthful and eco-friendly its materials are, and the price of a home needs to be discussed in terms of long-term monthly costs rather than the hardly relevant upfront cost.

The more information consumers have, the more likely they are to make the best decisions for themselves and for the planet. Terms such as R-value, U-factor, and VOC ought to be a part of the accepted lexicon with which we discuss a home’s value. We need a standardized, trustworthy, and informative label to come with each home that is built and sold in this country, just as we have nutrition labels for food. This label should describe the sustainability of each home’s design, which, in turn, needs to be a factor in calculating the actual cost of ownership. Homebuyers deserve that much. So does our planet.