There are countless houses in the Chicago suburbs that look just like the small, brick home on the 2200 block of Catherine Street in Northbrook.

But behind the familiar facade is an array of gizmos and materials that make this particular house a shade greener than its mid-century counterparts.

While construction equipment on the front lawn indicates that the house is undergoing a renovation, this isn’t a typical remodel. With this project, the home’s owner, Tom Kenny, is thinking about the environment as much as accommodating his growing family.

Kenny, a developer with Scott Simpson Builders, has nearly completed a green renovation of his home, and his venture in Northbrook, as well as similar projects in Wilmette and Glenview, are what municipal officials hope to be examples of the future of residential construction.

“One of the ways we made it greener was we didn’t tear the house down,” Kenny said. “It probably would have been cheaper to tear it down.”

Kenny moved into the house two years ago after leaving Chicago for the suburbs. Then, his first child was born, and the house became too small. He and his partner in Scott Simpson Builders, Scott Simpson, had recently entered the world of green construction with a house on Oakwood Avenue in Wilmette, and Kenny decided to take the same route for his own home.

With the help of a Chicago architect, Kenny followed the U.S. Green Building Council’s guidelines for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. For instance, the new parts of the house utilize lumber certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, which Kenny said is harvested to minimize the impact on the Earth.

Also, the exterior brick was re-used from local teardowns, and 95 percent of the waste generated during the project was recycled, Kenny said.

Other aspects of the project were designed as much for long-term savings as sustainability. For example, the roof reflects sunlight, helping keep energy costs down in the summer, and energy-efficient windows help prevent treated air from seeping out.

Kenny also installed a geo-thermal heating and air-conditioning system, which heats and cools the home using the Earth’s own energy.

“My energy bills went way down,” he said, estimating that they were reduced by about 50 percent.

In fact, he said he made the house so energy-efficient that he had to install a ventilator to bring in some outside air.

“When you build a house this tight, you can actually poison the air with your own carbon dioxide,” he said. “If you live in a plastic bag long enough, that air is going to expire.”

While Kenny and other homeowners who build green look to save money over time through reduced utility bills, the fact is the up-front costs of construction a green home aren’t always cheap.

Although Kenny said he is not seeking LEED certification for his Northbrook home, the Wilmette house is going through the certification process, and that can cost thousands of dollars.

“That cost for a home through our organization tends to be $2,500 to $3,000,” said Jason La Fleur, LEED Homes for Illinois program manager with the Alliance for Environmental Sustainability, an organization that aids people through the LEED certification process and serves as a third-party verification source for LEED certification.

However, premiums associated with construction and system installation are harder to quantify, La Fleur said.

“A lot of [the research] is focused on commercial construction, because that’s where things have started out and it’s trickled down to residential homes,” he said. “At this point, because [green building] is relatively new, a lot of the data out there is hard to generalize across broad cost premiums.”

Kenny had a few concrete examples of premiums, though. His geo-thermal system set him back $18,000, and the energy-efficient insulation he installed cost $12,000.

The owners of the Wilmette home, Matt and Nina Gworek, also said there were many large expenses associated with building their home, which, although new construction, shares many features with Kenny’s own.

“The cost is definitely not low,” Nina Gworek said. “It’s a question of, how do you want to spend your money? We decided on our home.”

She added that she and her husband, who works in commercial real estate, hope that as the technology and building techniques become more widespread, the initial premiums will come down.

But the federal government is willing to step in to help with some of those costs. La Fleur said that for the past few years, the government has offered rebates for 30 percent of the cost of geo-thermal energy systems and environmentally-friendly insulation, and Kelly said he will take advantage of those programs.

Some Chicago-area municipalities, including Northbrook, also offer their own programs to encourage greener construction. The Northbrook village board passed an ordinance in 2008 that is based on the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system and allows the village to offer rebates of 10 to 40 percent of permit fees for community members who build or renovate to those standards, said Dan Kaup, assistant to the village manager.

Kaup said it’s a potentially beneficial program that hasn’t gotten the attention some village officials had hoped.

“Unfortunately, as soon as we passed it, the building market collapsed,” he said.

Kaup said that the village will completely reimburse permit fees for the first building in each of four categories — newly constructed commercial building, newly constructed institutional building, newly constructed residential building and alteration of an existing building — to receive LEED certification.

Ironically, Kenny is not aiming for LEED certification in Northbrook, where incentives are offered, but his project in Wilmette, where incentives are not offered at the local level, could receive a LEED Platinum rating, the U.S. Green Building Council’s highest rating, said La Fleur, who is familiar with the Wilmette house. (Nina Gworek said that while she and her husband are aiming for Platinum, they are unsure whether they will receive that rating.)

John Adler, director of community development for the village of Wilmette, said that while elected officials in his village have not passed a sustainability ordinance, the state’s recently-adopted Energy Conservation Code for residential buildings requires most construction projects to adhere to the latest published edition of the Illinois Energy Conservation Code.

Adler also said a handful of Wilmette residents have opted to build energy-efficient homes despite the lack of village incentives, an indication that people might not need a nudge from public officials.

“Because the state required municipalities to adopt the code, my guess is [a local incentive program is] something more communities will be interested in,” he said, adding that once the economy improves, communities might see more green houses built on spec.

But Kelly isn’t waiting to start his next project. He said he and Simpson are going to continue their work in the green building field, and they are already at work on another home in Glenview.

“We realized a lot of this stuff made sense,” Kenny said. “We’re very energy-conscious guys.”

— TribLocal