Marc Rutenberg, the CEO of the Florida company Marc Rutenberg Homes, has recently successfully designed and built a luxury home that complies with and even surpasses all Energy Star standards and is LEED Platinum certified. The Castaway III, as the house is called, measures 4,552-square feet, which is about 3,100 square feet larger than the average zero-energy home. This house proves that there is no need to sacrifice comfort and luxury to reduce one’s carbon footprint.

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Jay Hicks didn’t miss a beat when he lost his South Carolina cabin to a fire. He decided to build off of the 80-year-old original structure’s partial wall that had remained standing and devised a plan to have Addison Homes design and build a high-performance, energy efficient home that would have an old-world charm.

Fitting the floor plan to the topography and granite subsurface of the site that is located near Caesars Head State Park, Todd Usher, president of Addison Homes, directed workers to follow the flow of the rock shelf and form a foundation of concrete footings made of recycled content. Rigid foam insulation that was placed under the slab serves as a thermal break. The structure is oriented to benefit from passive solar heating and natural daylighting.

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In the heart of a densely populated Washington, D.C. neighborhood that has easy access to public transportation and bicycle routes, this historically-protected Georgetown rowhouse (circa 1800s) received a restoration treatment that brought it into the 21st century and helped it to achieve LEED Platinum certification.

Environmentally sustainable modifications to the 3,300 square foot home came in at $269 per square foot and had to be approved by the neighborhood’s stringent historic preservation review process.

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This Nederland, Colorado container home, designed by Studio H:T, performs at net-zero energy consumption by utilizing passive strategies of insulation and orientation, active solar photovoltaic and thermal systems, and the harvesting of on-site renewable fuel (timber is selectively and sustainably cleared to burn in the high-efficiency wood stove).

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Dubbed BARNagain,  this LEED Platinum-certified home was designed by Rick Hauser of In.Site:Architecture to meet the client’s request for an energy-efficient house that utilized materials from a deteriorating barn for its structure and skin.

The main structural elements of the home were built using timber frames, while reclaimed barn siding served as the exterior skin. Salvaged barn framing was also used for flooring, ceilings, drywall, and decking.

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