HGTV Green Home - June 2011

By Kemp Harr

HGTV built this year’s Green Home, its fourth, in Stapleton, Colorado and soon Scripps Networks, HGTV’s parent company, will give the home away, as part of a $700,000 package, in a raffle conducted through the network’s website. Once again, Shaw Industries is the flooring sponsor for the home, and all of the interior floors (and even some of the walls) feature Shaw’s products.

This is the first year that the home was built west of the Mississippi, and part of the green story is tied to the fact that the entire neighborhood has been repurposed and was once the runway area of Stapleton International Airport.

Built in view of the mothballed airport control tower, the Green Home features all the right attributes to qualify as sustainable. To start, the architect optimized the space usage and fit three bedrooms and two and a half baths into a 2,300 square foot space that seems very roomy. In addition, the home was built with locally sourced materials, whenever possible, including interior doors that were made from beetle-kill wood, hardscape made from crushed runway concrete and retaining walls made from pieces of blast fence from the old airport. It also features furniture and accessories made with eco-friendly fabrics and materials. In terms of flooring, the Green Home has Epic hardwood with recycled content and Anso carpet that contains recycled nylon and is also recyclable.

In addition, the home received a HERS (Home Energy Rating System) score of 38 (the lower the score the better), which means that it is roughly 62% more efficient than the average new home. The Green Home includes a photovoltaic five-kilowatt solar energy system that provides 75% of its energy.

Sponsorship of the Green Home is a great tie-in to Shaw’s new licensing deal with HGTV, which includes carpet, hardwood, laminate and area rugs. Joining forces with HGTV, the powerhouse of home-related media, is no doubt a brilliant move for Shaw. In a recent conversation, Bruce Odette of Denver based Carpet Exchange noted that the alignment makes much more sense than licensing with a random celebrity.

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