Colleen Young considers herself a home stager, though many of her clients aren’t planning to move anytime soon. Instead, they contact her company, Eco-Century Modern, for help renovating their older St. Louis homes.
“My philosophy is to increase the value of a house,” Young says. “One of the greatest ways we can do that is by making it more energy efficient.”
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After an initial consultation and walk-through, Young will make recommendations ranging in cost and difficulty. Some of them are major, such as updating pipes, installing solar panels, putting in a geothermal pump for heating, or switching to low-flow bathroom fixtures. Others—decluttering, painting, resealing windows, or installing LED bulbs—are easy fixes and less costly. The goal, regardless of the scale of the suggested renovations, is to create more earth-friendly environments.
As she works, Young makes sure that the homes look good, too. She advises clients to find modern, energy-efficient appliances that fit the home’s overall style, and supplements existing décor with great finds from local resale shops. She also offers landscaping suggestions that incorporate native plants and shrubs to improve curb appeal and cut down on watering costs.
Renovations typically take somewhere between a week and a month, and Young relies on her large network of contractors to keep projects on track.
Although the California native started the company in 2017, the idea first came to her several years ago as she was studying the kiwi bird in New Zealand.
During her research trip, Young lived on a farm where residents were expected to use composting toilets and line-dry their laundry. “They were really shocked that we don’t hang-dry our clothes, because a lot of places in California are technically the desert, so it’s a lot drier than Missouri,” she says. “It sparked my curiosity about why we do certain things the way we do in America and the options that we have to become more sustainable with our resources.”
As she was wrapping up her graduate degree in anthropology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, she moved to St. Louis and started thinking about how to apply what she had learned outside academia.
“I focus on humans on islands and how they adapt to limited resources,” she says. “Over the years in the places I’ve studied and the research I’ve done, I’ve learned a lot of nifty, creative, innovative ways that people with limited resources can reuse items, how they reduce items they use to minimize waste, and essentially how they adapt to these resources.”
Now she’s using that specialized knowledge to bring sustainability to St. Louis’ historic architecture, one house at a time.
“We’re in an age where there are a lot of green incentives,” Young says, listing some of the rebates available from local utility companies for energy-saving upgrades such as programmable thermostats. “We can be more progressive while maintaining those cool styles that were once so popular.”
