You’d never know from looking at it that the house Bill Beasley remodeled at 3411 Dover Road in Durham is loaded with enough energy-saving, environmentally friendly features to qualify for Gold certification, the highest level set by the Green Home Builders of the Triangle. From the street, nary a solar panel is visible on its multi-angle roofline. The 1984 transitional home in the golf-course community of Hope Valley blends in well with its neighbors near the country club.

“We wanted to make a house that didn’t scream it was some crazy green house,” said Beasley, owner of Red-B Construction in Durham. “From the curb, it looks like a normal house, but our goal was to make this as green and sustainable as we could.”

Beasley’s house near the golf course green is one of 36 homes on the fourth annual Green Home Tour going on this weekend. Spread out over six counties this year, the tour features several homes that don’t fit the stereotype of an earth-friendly, power-miserly house. Tour entries demonstrate shades of green as applied to starter homes, estate homes and upscale contemporaries. Some are in resource-conscious green communities; others edge golf courses; one is built in a shopping mall. Most are still under construction so that tour-goers can see the green systems and eco-friendly features that are hidden once the drywall is mudded into place.

The tour is free and self-guided and sponsored jointly by the Home Builders Association of Durham, Orange and Chatham Counties and the Home Builders Association of Raleigh-Wake County. Pick up a tour book at Whole Foods and Stock Building Supply locations.

Beasley’s Hope Valley house is the only whole-house remodel on the tour this year. The renovations, while extensive, are feasible for retrofitting and updating older homes to become more energy efficient and environmentally conscious, Beasley said.

Outside, Beasley used a special brick that is a third thinner than standard brick, thus using less material and less energy to make the brick. That the brick is lighter and locally made saves even more energy in transporting it to the site. Because it is thinner, masons use less mortar installing it, yet it looks identical to standard brick.

“There are subtle things like that buried throughout the house, and they all have good stories,” Beasley said.

Inside, Beasley used three types of insulation to maximize energy efficiency. He installed an ultra-efficient HVAC system in lieu of a geothermal system that can be cost prohibitive for many homeowners. He added solar hot water panels on the roof (though they are not visible from the street). The house is one of the first in Durham to have a gray-water recovery system that filters and re-chlorinates on site the wastewater from the sinks and showers to be reused in flushing the toilets.

“This house should be about 70 percent more efficient than a code-standard house,” Beasley said.

The house is a finalist for the 2009 National Association of Home Builders National Green Building Awards. Winners will be announced in mid-May.

Five years ago, Beasley was one of the original half-dozen members of the Green Building Initiative, the forerunner to the Green Home Builders of the Triangle (GHBT), as was Randy Lanou, who has run BuildSense, a design/build firm of environmentally conscious residential and light commercial projects for the past nine years. Last year, Lanou partnered with Erik Mehlman, one of his classmates in N.C. State University’s master’s degree program in architecture, to open Studio B Architects. This year’s Green Home Tour features two contemporary homes from BuildSense and Studio B.

“There’s a great range of green building going on,” Mehlman said. “We’re hoping the fact that these two houses are unusual will make them stand out from other green-building designs.” BuildSense and Studio B designed the house on Cole Drive in Chapel Hill for Arthur Zuco, whose position in the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget office for air-quality programs influenced his decision to build green.

“Dealing with environmental concerns on a day-to-day basis, it kind of rubs off on you,” Zuco said. “It became a matter of practicing what I preach.”

Zuco wanted a ranch-level home that fit in with the modern aesthetic. He discovered, he said, that “the things I liked aesthetically had a functional component.” The concrete floors, for instance, act as a thermal mass that absorbs heat from the sun during the day and radiates it back into the house throughout the night. To prevent that process during the summer, Studio B designed metal awnings along the windows on the south side of the house. The awnings block the sun during summer months when the sun is higher on the horizon but allow the warming rays in during winter, when the sun shines low in the sky.

“These awnings are absolutely gorgeous,” Zuco said. “They define the entrance and create a patio atmosphere on the front of the house. It’s my favorite feature, and they serve a purpose.”

Zuco’s house has a manifold plumbing system that delivers water from the hot water source to each fixture individually. The pipes are smaller in diameter than standard hot water pipes. The hot water runs through the pipes at greater force and arrives at the tap sooner, so the user won’t waste water waiting for the hot water to appear.

Zuco did have to forego solar hot water panels on the roof because of all the trees around his home. “I would have had to remove a wide swath of trees on the south side of the house to have the sun hit the solar thermal collectors,” he said. “I didn’t want to ruin one part of the environment for the sake of trying to save another portion of the environment.”

But as interest rates came down with the economy, a photo-voltaic system became affordable. That could be set farther from the house in a natural clearing. Zuco also had to make some changes to accommodate stormwater diversion regulations that, while adding to the price, he said, “over the long run, it’s the right thing to do.”

Mehlman, of BuildSense/Studio B, said that he talks with potential clients about long-term vs. short-term sustainable strategies and technologies that will add to the cost of building a home but do pay the homeowner back in energy cost savings.

“Your return on some items could be two years; on other items, 15 years,” he said. He is heartened by the response of people who come to Studio B for sustainable designs. “The trend,” he said, “is to think long term about what your legacy is and what you’re leaving behind.”

Visit a few of the Green Home Tour entries to see how you can shade your legacy green.

Nancy E. Oates is a business and real estate writer in Chapel Hill. Reach her at neoates@earthlink.net.