“We are master builders committed to craftsmanship and strict environmental protection. Our mission is to build the most comfortable, healthy, efficient, and environmentally responsible homes possible.”

Style is the synthesis of experience, innovation and design. Imagine a home designed around you, your family, and the way you live. You talk, we listen. Ideas, thoughts, issues, concerns, and costs, all of it gets considered in the design process. Out of that process, your home will emerge, a vivid, vital expression of who you are, giving your home a unique style you can call your own.

SDG has been a pioneer and innovator in green high performance homes for decades. We have developed numerous building and renewable energy products and technologies to maximize comfort and health while minimizing operating costs and environmental footprint. Our attention to detail results in homes that can be self-sufficient and completely independent of the electricity, water, and sewer grids.

SDG President John Spears has been designing and building healthy, energy-efficient, green, solar homes around the world for over 35 years with an emphasis on self-sufficient buildings and communities. He has designed sustainable communities in Mexico, South Africa, and China, including the Beijing Olympic Village. Over 6,000 of John Spears' Earth Homes™ have been built around the world, and he has consulted on numerous LEED projects.

John Spears
Brian Carroll

Sustainable Design Staff:

John Spears, President
Sean de Launey, Vice President
Brian Carroll, Project Designer
Kathleen O'Hearn, Architect
Richard Crenshaw, Senior Architect

Brian Carroll, Project Designer

Project Designer
Sustainable Design Group

Brian Carroll is a designer with over a decade of experience in residential and light commercial design and construction, focusing on Historic Preservation and Sustainable Design. He has been able to work at all scales of the building process, from creating custom windows and doors through construction, and architecture to large scale Urban Design. Whether restoring existing buildings or building new, Brian has maintained a consistent focus on responsible development.

Brian Carroll began his career in the building industry with two years of training in Preservation Carpentry at Boston’s North Bennet Street School, followed by several years of restoring historic buildings. Highlights of this period include work on the Emily Dickenson House in Amherst, Massachusetts as well as supervising the restoration of the slave quarters at the Riverdale mansion in Riverdale, Maryland.

Over the last decade Brian has worked for the award winning firm of Miche Booz Architects in Brookeville, Maryland and GTM Architects in Bethesda, Maryland. In 2008, Brian achieved a longtime goal of beginning to work with John Spears at Sustainable Design Group, working on all aspects of the design of efficient, innovative, thoughtful homes.

Brian holds a Bachelors degree in Psychology from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, a diploma in Preservation Carpentry from The North Bennet Street School and Masters Degrees in Architecture (M.Arch), and Community Planning (M.C.P.) and a graduate certificate in Urban Design from the University of Maryland.