For anyone with eco-friendly ideals as well as a penchant for high style, Dreaming Green showcases seventeen inspiring homes that are at once luxurious, beautiful, and fashioned inside and out with green materials, design, and details.

While renovating their Manhattan brownstone, Lisa Sharkey and LEED-accredited architect Paul Gleicher’s top priority was to create a home that was light on the earth and completely free of the harmful products that are often found in building and decorative supplies. A sophisticated couple who entertain frequently, Sharkey and Gleicher also demanded a home that was beautiful from the basement to the top floor’s sunroom. They sourced stylish and elegant materials, designed small and large spaces for flawless efficiency, and finished the project with responsible yet stunning finds.

Dreaming Green features the Sharkey-Gleicher brownstone as well as sixteen other environmentally responsible, impeccably designed residences that will stir readers to reimagine their homes as places that marry responsibility and beauty. From cities and suburbs to the countryside, Dreaming Green showcases places of myriad sizes, shapes, and styles. Each space, with its floors, gorgeous fabrics, nontoxic paints and finishes, wall coverings, furniture, fixtures, use of recycled materials, and other details, is a treasure for the eye and a gift to the earth. What’s more, Sharkey and Gleicher highlight unseen design elements that conserve resources, such as passive heating and cooling methods and ideas for low-impact building and renovation, among other innovations. The spaces on display here prove that saving the earth never needs to compromise comfort and elegance.

Make yourself at home and lose yourself in:
• An English Tudor–style home in Austin, Texas, that was built from cast earth clay and utilizes a wind-powered energy system. The home is decorated throughout with gorgeous antiquities and salvaged materials.
• An upstate New York eco-farmhouse perfectly situated on a hilltop and designed to catch the breezes from the surrounding Berkshire hills. The owner-architect used local craftspeople—none based more than a mile away—to further the “buy local” ideal.
• An Ann Arbor, Michigan, “sunhome” built to capture the sun’s rays for maximum heating and lighting. The modern marvel is U-shaped to accommodate an eighty-year-old magnolia growing on the property.
• A glamorous southern showplace in Atlanta, Georgia, which the owners christened “Ecomanor.” It hearkens back to the stateliness of an earlier time but is also a model of contemporary energy efficiency and sustainability.

Lavishly photographed, Dreaming Green also boasts an invaluable resource section—a boon to anyone embarking on making a green home, renovating a current residence into one, or just dreaming about doing so. Dreaming Green is both a practical guide and a rich source of inspiration.

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"Green Your Dream Home: How to green your home for eco-friendly living" on ABC News

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LISA SHARKEY was Good Morning America’s senior producer and is now senior vice president and director of creative development at HarperCollins. Her husband, LEED-accredited architect PAUL GLEICHER, is the founder and president of Gleicher Design Group, a prestigious architectural and design firm in New York City.

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