ECOCITÉ and Building Green

Live in something
truly special

Media Section

A different kind of development company

ECOCITÉ is the result of the dynamic partnership of Cheryl Gladu and Christopher Sweetnam-Holmes. Together these young eco-entrepreneurs are setting the standard for urban housing, with aggressively green, innovatively designed, urban homes.

Far ahead of the rest of the real estate industry, Christopher built a prototype EcoCondo project in Montreal (Habitat 1). He and Cheryl have since joined with other partners and investors to develop EcoCité into a national eco-development and consulting group, encouraging others to adopt a greener, healthier approach to building.

Christopher Sweetnam-Holmes,
B.Int'l Bus, B.E.D.S.(Arch), LEED AP, is an environmentalist, architect, real estate developer and businessman. Passionate about the environment, Christopher believes that social and environmental entrepreneurship can be a powerful way to affect change. This belief has been translated in the development of his EcoCondo and EcoCité housing concepts.

Winner of the McGill University Management Award, 2005 and the Berkeley Prize for Architecture, from the University of California at Berkeley (2001), Christopher has been featured in numerous media for his innovative housing ideas. Most recently he was included in “The Great Warming” a major documentary series that aired on the Discovery Channel, Canal D, and PBS.

Cheryl Gladu,
MBA, B.Int'l Bus, is a community and environmental activist, as well as businesswoman. She has several years of management experience in the private sector, and has held various positions in the environmental not-for-profit sector. A marketing specialist, Cheryl understands that environmentally sustainable products offer a number of inherent benefits, yet are often poorly positioned in the marketplace.

With this in mind, she has worked with numerous socially responsible organizations and companies to successfully communicate the social desirability of healthy, sustainable products and services.

Both Cheryl and Christopher enthusiastically contribute to workshops, lectures and classes on social and environmental entrepreneurship and professional, social marketing. Rare is the opportunity to promote sustainability overlooked by the two animated speakers.

ECOCITÉ was founded on
the following principles:

  • People should have affordable housing choices that make it easy to reduce their impact on the environment.
      
  • People want homes that are energy efficient, use fewer of our precious natural resources, have a healthy indoor air quality, and are in walking distance to parks, stores and entertainment.
     
  • People want to live where they have convenient access to public transit and have short distances to travel to work. 

  • People want interesting and innovatively designed homes that are filled with natural light, which have good ventilation, comfortable heating and cooling, and are easy and inexpensive to maintain.   

  • People expect that the air in their homes should be free of toxic chemicals and moulds which affect their health.

  • People want to feel connected to nature, they want a place for a small garden, room indoors for a few plants, trees on the street and vegetation to integrate with the building.

  • People want to feel a connection to their community.

top

Next Page > ECOCITÉ and Building Green

"An innovative concept, the EcoCondo offers an urban lifestyle with respect for nature and in harmony with it. Are we witnessing the long overdue home of the future?” Le Devoir

"Their new project combines a taste for contemporary green architecture with a community based ideology and approach that could be cribbed straight from a Jane Jacobs book."  This Magazine

"EcoCité Developments, a small firm that has been banging the drum for ecological construction long before Al Gore alerted the world to An Inconvenient Truth..." The Gazette

Christopher