Yankee Ingenuity: A New England home uses innovative, eco-friendly technology.

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Tony and Sally Grassi’s house blends New England tradition with cutting-edge green technology. Run entirely by renewable energy, it fits beautifully into Maine’s coastal ecosystem. Brian Vanden Brink

Clad in unpretentious wood-shingle siding, Sally and Tony Grassi’s coastal Maine home looks every bit the stoic New England farmhouse. Yet beneath its traditional exterior is cutting-edge environmental innovation: A blend of geothermal and solar power generates the energy the couple uses, plus the home employs a host of environmentally sensitive building techniques.

Tony and Sally’s goal was to create a nontoxic, eco-friendly home that reflects their environmental ideals. They declared independence from nonrenewable energy and banned PVC, a planet-polluting plastic, from their house. They also insisted on sustainably forested, formaldehyde-free wood for both framing and finishes.

Set back from the ocean on an 18-acre parcel of field and forest, the house and accompanying buildings occupy the site of a house removed by a former landowner. “We didn’t want to make a new scar on the land,” Tony says. The couple built a cluster of buildings around a central courtyard: the main house (with kitchen, living room, dining room, office, master bedroom and guest room), a guest house (with three more bedrooms) and a workshop/garden house. A pony barn, which houses the complex’s solar panels, is farther away in an open field. No trees were cut to make room for the new buildings.

“We wanted to keep the house small but have enough room for our extended family for holidays,” Sally says. Locating most of the guest rooms in a separate building allows them to turn off the power there until company comes.

Learning and leading

The Grassis worked closely with architects Dwayne Flynn  and Matthew Elliott of Elliott Elliott Norelius Architecture and builder Jay Fischer of Cold Mountain Builders. “Lessons from the Grassi house continue to influence our firm’s decisions on new projects,” Flynn says. “Tony and Sally were intensely involved in choosing materials. They wanted to know how everything was made, how durable it was and whether it was reusable or recyclable in the distant future.”

The retired couple was also concerned about the health of their home and those working on it. “Before we decided to build, we visited new houses for ideas, and I was struck with how poorly they were built and how toxic they smelled,” Sally says. “I never dreamed we’d be discussing chemical terms such as PVC, dioxin and PBDE like professionals, but doing our homework helped us build a safe home.”

Even with the architect and builder firmly on board, the Grassis faced a problem common to many green homebuilders: skepticism from subcontractors. But they were firm in their requests, and in the end, many of the alternatives they found cost the same or slightly more than conventional materials. Plus, they were just as easy—and safer—for contractors to work with. “We learned you have to be a bulldog and not give up easily,” Sally says. “We made trade-offs, but we were pleased to hear that a lot of our subcontractors now incorporate green materials into all their work.”