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Ever Green

Cindy Allen -- Interior Design, 6/1/2007 12:00:00 AM

June is green month, as in eco. Come to think of it, though, so are July and August and so on and so on and so on. 'Bout time, too. Sustainability is here to stay. (Stick around long enough, and who knows? Maybe someone will even come up with LEED standards we simple folk can grasp.)

In fact, we should have asked about that when we visited the veritable capital of green, the headquarters of the U.S. Green Building Council—but we were too busy being surprised by Perkins + Will's interior. Expecting elements of conventional, non-green design to be missing when "doing the right thing," like dutiful children eating their spinach, we were stopped right in our tracks. The USGBC is truly worthy of receiving a Platinum rating for LEED points and design-as-it-ought-to-be: witty, engaging, welcoming, unpredictable, and resourceful, the latter especially in terms of resources, of course.

To save on jet fuel, we also traveled on your behalf to four far-flung locations in search of great health-care projects and assembled them in one special portfolio. From Oporto to Nagano, we found zest and imagination paired with a deeply moral purpose—just like at the USGBC.

On the residential front, we stopped by a celebrity chef's house in L.A. and, a few hundred miles to the north, the not-quite-ancestral home that our dearest friend Calvin Tsao built for his parents, a place where three generations can gather throughout the year. The spacious rooms are filled with Asian antiques and contemporary furniture, and the views of hilly Piedmont are very, very green.