Shades of Green

Southwest Florida’s green building efforts are about to get a great big boost as Emerald House, a $13.5 million eco-friendly estate home, gets ready to rise on Fort Charles Drive in Port Royal.

The energy-efficient megamansion was dreamed up by Dick Hickton, a commercial industrial developer, yacht builder and chicken farmer from Worcester, England, and Mark Raudenbush, owner of Bonita Springs-based Idyll Construction.

"Dick started coming to Naples nine years ago," recalls Mitch Williams, a broker associate with Premier Properties and the Emerald House listing agent. "He bought a couple of vacation homes here and built one with Mark, but when the lot-and-a-half he had on Fort Charles didn’t attract a good selling price, they decided to build a house that would combine the latest concepts of green construction with the best features of luxury living."

Green building and sustainable ways of life can no longer be shrugged off, says Hickton. "We must address these new issues today, not tomorrow. In Europe, nearly all responsible folk are thinking this way, since energy costs are not going to be cheap again in the foreseeable future."

Williams notes that WCI’s Artesia and Bonita Bay Group’s Verandah communities offer green homes at moderate price levels, but one at the Emerald House price point is fairly unusual.

"Although the person who buys this home doesn’t have to save dollars, he wants to, not only because saving energy saves the planet, but because the nonpolluting components will improve the air quality for all who live there," he says.

Naples building official Paul Bollenback agrees. "This is where the marketplace is going," he says. "We’re starting to notice as much interest from luxury homeowners as we do from other sectors of the community. We’ve seen one Port Royal man design a $100,000 water reclamation system, not because he needed to save money, but because he thought it was the right thing to do."