Grassroots green. That's the best way to describe the twin townhouses that make their singular sustainable stand amid the blocks of brownstones that define Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.

With all the big residential projects in Manhattan hogging the headlines, it's as refreshing as a breath of filtered air to find that this pair, which features more than 100 green innovations, was seeded by developers who live in the neighborhood.

The circa-1880s brownstone at Nevins and Pacific streets had led a busy and useful life, first as a private home and then as a series of commercial enterprises, including a pharmacy, deli, and then a laundry, but a 1980 fire turned it into a dilapidated and dangerous eyesore.

Everyone in the neighborhood passed it by every day, but nobody did anything about it until 2003, when developers Emily Fisher and her husband, Rolf Grimsted, of R&E Brooklyn (www.rebklyn.com), bought it, sight unseen. "We were not allowed to enter the building because it was dangerous, so we really didn't know what we were getting," she says. "We essentially paid $700,000 for a black box."

They weren't sure what they wanted to do with the property, other than making it an asset to the community. So they did the financially unthinkable—they held neighborhood meetings to get ideas for its future. And they got their neighbors so fired up about its prospects that some of them even invested in the venture.

Once they decided to make it a residential project, they took the best of the old—the 1920s brick façade—and the new—cutting-edge green features and contemporary floor plans—to create what Fisher calls "townhouses reinvented for the future."

"We had an idealistic bent—my husband and I had worked with nonprofits—and we had a desire to build something that was less reliant on limited resources," Fisher says. "I like the idea of multilayered textures that speak of the past. And this speaks of old Brooklyn."

It also speaks of courage and ingenuity, because the project was started before many green building materials were widely available in Brooklyn, and before the U.S. Green Building Council issued its LEED design guidelines for residential buildings.

The couple assembled a green team that included architect Tony Daniels of Studio A/WASA; the architectural design firm of Kiss + Cathcart; contractor Robert Politzer of GreenStreet Construction; interior designers Erika Doering and Erika Hanson; and Sarah Beatty, co-founder of Green Depot, a Brooklyn-based source of sustainable building products.

The concept of going green snowballed, and before long the project became 100-percent eco-friendly. It will be the first LEED-certified residential project in the borough, and Beatty says it may earn a rating as high as Gold. It also is the city's first American Lung Association Health House (www.healthhouse.org), a designation that requires adherence to strict air-quality standards.

"It's so valuable to know you are living in a healthy house," says Beatty. "Some houses are sealed so tightly that the air inside is 80 percent to 90 percent more toxic than the air outside. This house," which utilizes an energy-recovery ventilator, "acts like a lung by pulling in air from the outside and purifying it. It filters the air on the way in and does not add bad components to it in the interior. By the time it exhausts, the air going out is cleaner than what's outside." 

Solar panels on the roof provide electricity and virtually all the domestic hot water for the townhouses, and an innovative hybrid solar-thermal and gas-fired system, which includes under-floor radiant heating, heats and cools the space. "This is a small lot—it's only 20 feet by 80 feet," says Beatty, "and the under-floor heating saves room because you don't have to have radiators or heating vents."