A Money-Saving, Stylish Green Kitchen

"I wanted to build a house for myself and my mother that was practical, eco-friendly and affordable," says Claudia Peduzzi, an elementary-school reading specialist who lives in southwestern Rhode Island. And to suit their "cooking-intensive lifestyle," the kitchen had to be spacious, beautiful and functional.

Long before buying the land for her dream house, Claudia had researched and planned many details. Why green? "I was attracted to the energy-saving side of it, then other things sprouted from it," she recalls.

In the summer of 1991, Claudia and her sister, Mary, drove to Maine for a three-week class at the Shelter Institute, where they learned environmental impacts as well as basic design concepts both in the classroom and in practice on job sites. "Although we were apprehensive at first, because building is a male-dominated profession, most of the lectures, as it turned out, were given by very knowledgeable women," she says.

As Claudia's experience shows, green homes are gaining ground in the United States: 13,224 were built in 2002 alone compared with 18,884 for the entire decade of the 1990s. The trend is attracting a broader economic spectrum of homeowners thanks to public awareness, new technologies and a growing market in environmentally sounder materials. As defined by Daniel Chiras, author of The New Ecological Home (Chelsea Green, 2004, $35), building green means minimizing the negative impact on the natural world while creating a healthy living environment. The U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) has developed standards that encompass a building's use of natural resources, healthy materials, recycling and more. (Currently available for commercial properties, schools and apartment buildings, LEED certification for houses is scheduled to debut in early 2006.)