Published by Martha Danly under Green Building, Inside Design, LEED, Sustainability

David and Sara Gottfried’s Oakland, California home is the ne plus ultra of green by design. Based on its LEED Platinum certification and GreenPoint Rating, the recent restoration of their 1915 Craftsman house has generated the highest green scores of any home in the United States. Their property is off-the-charts green.

These accolades may not be surprising in light of David’s role as founder of the U.S. Green Building Council, the creators of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), and inventor of its sister organization, the World Green Building Council. David is now CEO of Regenerative Ventures, which helps businesses enhance their value and profitability through green building initiatives.

But dig a little deeper and you’ll find that LEED certification per se was not the underlying spark for all this greenness—it came from David and Sara themselves, who live by the principle that sustainability starts in the heart-of-hearts, not with technology or products.

In the green movement’s popular speak, David and Sara have a ‘triple bottom line’ marriage. They create their own well-being by striving for a holistic balance of ecology, economy, and equity in everything they do. Their standard checklist asks:

• Is it good for the planet?
• Is it good for the pocketbook?
• Is it good for people?

Meeting David the other day for a guided tour, I was welcomed at the front door by a man who was at once both approachable and intense. Almost at once I could feel the history, warmth, and balance of the place. Sitting in the living room with the afternoon sun streaming in the windows (yes, they’re new, energy efficient and perfectly Craftsman), he outlined the grounding principles and practical issues underlying the ‘deep-green’ renovation that he and Sara completed last fall.

Complementing David’s background in engineering and resource management, Sara is a gifted physician and pioneer in the field of holistic medicine. She leads the Gottfried Center for Integrative Medicine in Oakland, where she and her team combine the best of traditional medicine with alternative natural therapies, in an enlightened effort to maximize their patients’ treatment options and health.

As a team, David and Sara frame their home, lives, and work in terms of balance. David gets to the heart of the matter by saying, “Unfortunately, green has become more about technologies, not people. Is it enough to say you are green if you drive a Prius, buy organic vegetables from Whole Foods, and buy carbon offsets from TerraPass?

“What if you’re overweight, not exercising, have tense family relationships, and feel stressed out? We’re frauds if we’re not looking at our bodies as temples and treating our relationships with care. This is a classic case of trying to solve the problem via 21^st century technologies, but being dragged down by 20^th century relationships with the self, family, community, country, and earth.”

As living proof of his commitment to personal sustainability, David has created and lives by a Life Balance Sheet, which he details in his 2004 memoir, Greed to Green. The balance sheet has scales for ten categories of life importance—health, mental and emotional development, work, finances, social life, cultural development, fun, compassion and giving, eco-sustainability, and personal contentment. You can’t live in balance by finessing work and finances at the expense of fun and mental health. There’s much food for thought and human potential here.

As David walked me through the house, garden, and standalone office at the rear of the property, I was able to sample a handful of the 1,000+ decisions that David and Sara made, guided by their own triple bottom line logic. The tour reinforced David’s statement that “you can’t buy green—you have to be green.”

After the tour, it was hard not to be somewhat dazzled by 106.5 LEED points and 179 GreenPoint Rating points. But these phenomenal results are intended to inspire us, not distance us by showing off. Only a tiny fraction of us will strive for a LEED Platinum home; yet regardless of circumstance, we can green anything, whether it’s a tract home, a doghouse, our food, or our health.

What started out as a tour of the Gottfried’s eco-Craftsman home developed into a high-energy, freewheeling conversation about sustainability. That energy will generate several more blogs about the Gottfried home, focusing on:

• Using green principles to define a sense of place
• Making every inch count in a 1,460 square foot home
• The joy of discovering and living with ‘eco-bling’
• Re-thinking the market value of green homes

So stay tuned.