Three bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs all have windows, transoms and extra tall ceilings. The children's rooms also have access to a sleeping porch on the east side of the house that looks into the tree canopy.

One of the most interesting green components of the home is the toilet/composting system. Waste will be converted ultimately to soil and used in the garden.

The toilets are ultra-low flush, the same units used in yachts, Harum-Alvarez says, so they flush with as little as a pint of water. That water is drained from the bottom of the composting unit. At this point, Harum-Alvarez says he and his wife are considering whether to handle the water through the septic system or a gray-water garden.

The composter has four compartments that rotate, so as one fills, a next can receive the waste. By the time the fourth compartment fills, the first can be emptied with a small shovel as composted soil.

The family also opted for the geothermal cooling/heating pump.

John Moore, one of the owners of Hi-Tech Air Service, worked on the air conditioning system for the home. He explains that a condenser takes heat from coils and discharges that into air. In a geothermal unit, relatively cool groundwater is pumped through a tube within a tube, taking the heat from freon and exchanging it with coolness from the water, then returning the water to the aquifer.

The cost is less than a standard system, Moore said, but there is the added expense of digging two wells and the pump needed to circulate the water.

''I'm sure he'll use a high efficiency pump, so yes, this will save money,'' Moore says.

Native landscaping includes preserved oaks and gumbo limbos, and along the eastern side, a to-be-planted native hammock. The original cottage will remain, perhaps to be rented.

On this unusual construction site, there is no Dumpster stacked sky-high with old boards and waste. Instead, there is a basement neatly stacked with used lumber and plywood, awaiting some future use.

They even have a plan for electric outtages.

''We hope to get an electric car,'' Harum-Alvarez says, ``and during power outtages, the batteries could supply the refrigerator.''

Costs aren't in yet because construction is ongoing.

''We expect that both our design costs and hard costs in building will be higher than the average,'' Harum-Alvarez says. ``We are essentially front-loading our expenses, so that the running costs of our household are reduced in the future.''

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