Eating chocolate, building green on Whidbey Island

Published 11:25 am Wednesday, March 18, 2009

I went to Whidbey Island yesterday to meet George Brunjes, an up-and-coming chocolatier, who creates amazing confections for his Freeland-based business, Chocolates by George!

Though I was there for that lovely little Easter-inspired story — set to hit The Herald’s Good Life section on April 1 — I also had a chance to tour The Highlands at Langley.

Set on 14 acres just outside Langley, it’s a cutting-edge eco-friendly housing development, one of the first in the state to meet the Puget Sound Partnership’s Low-Impact Development Guidelines.

Though there are only about 10 homes up now — and only a few occupied so far — it’s easy to see that is not a typical “development.”

Most of the homes are modestly sized, typically about 1,400 square feet, and they sit on smaller lots in a “new urbanist style” of cluster housing, with an emphasis on creating community through shared spaces.

Local award-winning architect Ross Chapin is the man behind many of the development’s home designs, including eight Craftsman-esque cottages, all clustered around a green swath of shared lawn.

In the model cottage I toured, upgrades were spent not on granite kitchen counters, but on energy-saving appliances, dual-flush toilets and low-VOC paints.

Green can be affordable, said Nancy Bartlett, who gave me a tour of the evergreen-enclosed development, which is expected to include 52 homes in all.

Cottages in the Snowberry Close section of the development start at $460,000, plus neighborhood association dues.

Anyone can visit the development from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, March 21 at an open house, featuring home tours, local food, an art show and a chance to speak with conservation and gardening experts as well as Chapin, who will discuss his book, “Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating Small Scale Community in a Large Scale World,” due from Taunton in 2010.

See the full schedule here. If you go, let me know what you think!