Building on the green side of the Prius-Humvee divide

After three years, David and Marlene Berry checked out of the Extended Stay hotel in Goleta and moved into a home built for them on Mountain Drive.

During the building process, the couple took a residential construction class at City College, and they are intimately familiar with almost every material that went into their new home.

From the outside, the Berrys’ involvement in their home project might appear to represent the norm in Montecito — and on the surface, that might be true. The Berrys are both about 50 years old, retired from Microsoft, and they have the resources and time to focus on their house.

But look a little closer at how people are building their homes in Montecito and there is often a key difference.

While there is a strong contingent of environmental types in Montecito, there is also a large group that is uninterested in building green. Call it the Prius-Humvee divide, since both vehicles are seen with regularity on Montecito streets.

For their part, the Berrys stand firmly in the Prius camp.

“The construction industry is still using 1920s technology,” said Mr. Berry, who is trained as an aeronautical engineer.

In their house, the Berrys wanted to use as little of the old technology as possible. He grew up in Zimbabwe and she in South Africa — places, they said, where people don’t take water, electricity and building materials for granted.

“We’ve always had this consciousness of you use what you need to use. Almost to the point where I feel some sort of cultural distance from people that waste resources,” Mr. Berry said.

“Like the person who runs the faucet while he’s washing his teeth. The water is going down the drain the whole time. I think that’s . . . selfishness and carelessness.”

The Berrys built a 2,600-square-foot, flat-roofed, modern stucco home with a ranch-style floor plan. In order to avoid using wood products, the cream-colored (or, as someone described it to Mr. Berry, “denim beige”) floor is made of poured concrete.

Underneath it zigzag half-inch-wide plastic pipes through which a highly efficient heater in the garage pumps 90-degree water, heating the house from beneath. The concrete itself is warmed first, and then the rest of the room.

“It’s a very natural feel,” said Mr. Berry. “You don’t have heat coming onto your head and your feet are still cold (as you would with forced air).”

As for air conditioning, the Berrys have none.

They created large overhangs that shield the house from intense summer sun but let in the warming winter light.

“See that blue thing out there?” Mr. Berry asked, pointing toward the ocean through his low-emissivity living room windows (sprayed with silver oxide on both sides and filled partially with argon gas to keep heat inside when it’s cold and outside when it’s hot). “That’s our air conditioner.”

While the Berrys got these green features and more in their new home, they didn’t get everything they wanted.

“We wanted to build a straw bale house,” said Mrs. Berry, referring to the building material that is an excellent insulator, but the costs would have been extravagant.

They also didn’t put solar panels on their roof, because the economics just didn’t make sense. Mr. Berry figured it would take about 30 years for the system to pay for itself.

For some, the fact that the Berrys had to scale back their project at all might be an insight into the Prius-Humvee divide.

“The really wealthy set in Montecito don’t have to worry about their dollars at all,” said Dennis Allen, the Berrys’ contractor, who is a prominent environmentally aware builder.

While he said there are exceptions — notably wealthy Hollywood people — in his 30 years of experience he has noticed that the very rich tend not to be interested in building green.

“But you go down a notch (to the upper middle class) and people are more concerned about where they’re putting their money. They are more wanting to do the right kind of thing because of their political orientation,” said Mr. Allen.