About Us

Home Green Home exists to inspire, educate, and provision. We choose products that support a healthy lifestyle, while also protecting the well-being of workers, farmers and ecosystems.

We operate a web business as well as a 2,300sf retail showroom in the heart of downtown Ithaca, NY.

We are an approved member business of Green America, Sustainable Tompkins, Local First Ithaca, and the Sustainable Enterprise & Entrepreneur Network. We are a certified Tompkins County Living Wage Employer.

In addition to carrying green products, we strive to be eco-responsible in all aspects of running our business. Our showroom features a low-maintenance polished concrete floor, and locally crafted fixtures made with reclaimed materials like barn boards, old window shutters, and rusty metal roofing. Store cleaning is done with water and microfiber cloths, or organic soaps. We ship in reused cardboard boxes, redirecting any incoming packing materials we can't use. Kitchen waste is composted. We support employee efforts to commute by bicycle or bus. We're a member of Alternatives Federal Credit Union, which is committed to reinvesting locally and creating economic opportunity for underserved people.

History

Part of the inspiration for Home Green Home came in 2003, while building our strawbale/timberframe home in Ecovillage at Ithaca (I was employed as a software engineer at the time). I found that I enjoyed researching greener materials and furnishings for our new house (largely online), and I realized that in a lot of product categories, there were superior alternatives to the items one would find by going into the big box stores. One could find things that were healthier for farmers, workers, consumers, and landfill-neighbors. There were sweatshop-free options, reclaimed and recycled options, more durable, and less toxic options. But many of these alternatives were fairly invisible to the average person who wasn't a highly motivated seeker.

Another inspiration was the sustainable food movement. After years of steady growth, the appeal of farmers' markets and organically grown food seemed to really be going mainstream. Artisanal breads and organic, shade-grown, fairly traded coffee was in. Wonderbread™ and instant coffee were way out. Mass-produced items of low quality were being replaced by healthier, high-quality handmade goods. "Slow food" was moving in quickly.

This success story got me to wondering – why not take these ideas beyond the kitchen? What about hand-crafted artisanal furniture for the living room, and fair-trade organic cotton towels for the bath? The industrial revolution had democratized access to useful things, but then had gone too far, filling our lives with, let's be frank, cheap plastic crap. The time seemed to be ripe to go post-industrial, to begin relocalizing our economy, to support networks of small values-driven companies, to gradually replace the morally-challenged transnational behemoths.

I realized that there is a larger portion of altruism in the purchase of an organic bath towel as compared to an organic carrot, because you don't eat the former. But once you "get" organic agriculture, I surmised, you will naturally want to protect the health of soils and farmers, and do right by future generations. You will want to know your furniture maker as well as your vegetable farmer.

So in early 2007 I created Home Green Home, as a place where people could find the sorts of things that would enable them to "take organic beyond the kitchen". A key goal was to become a kind of stealth education center, where people just wandering through would come away with some new ideas and inspirations. I was new to retail and had a lot to learn, but fortunately I quickly found a group of enthusiastic environmental educators and activists who were eager to help me develop and run the business. Working in our favor is a strong local sustainability movement. We continue to strive to evolve our store to better serve the community and the planet. We are very grateful for your support.