When Optima Verdana opened in Wilmette, it brought something the North Shore had never had: a residential community built to Two Green Globes certification, with a sustainability standard embedded in every material choice, every mechanical system, and every terrace plant. The building’s name comes from verdure, lush green vegetation, and the commitment that name implies runs deeper than landscaping. It runs through the concrete, the glass, the heating system, and the four-season vertical landscaping that keeps every terrace alive through a North Shore winter.

Two Green Globes

The Green Globes certification system is a rigorous, third-party assessment of a building’s environmental performance across energy, water, resources, emissions, indoor environment, and site considerations. Achieving Two Green Globes places Optima Verdana among the most sustainably built residential communities on Chicago’s North Shore, and reflects a commitment to environmental performance that was built into the design from the first sketch, not added afterward.

The construction itself begins with green concrete for the superstructure, a material that reduces the carbon footprint of the building’s most structurally intensive component. An energy-efficient VRF heating and cooling system provides highly responsive, zone-by-zone temperature control that dramatically reduces energy waste compared to conventional central systems. Bird-friendly glass on the building’s first three floors features a subtle pattern designed to prevent bird strikes, a detail that reflects the same level of attention to environmental impact that runs through every other aspect of the design.

The Vertical Landscaping System — Adapted for Four Seasons

Perhaps the most visible expression of Optima Verdana’s sustainability commitment is also the most personal: the vertical landscaping system that keeps every resident’s private terrace green year-round. This system, developed originally at Optima’s Arizona communities, where it was tested and refined across more than a decade of desert climate performance, was brought to the North Shore for the first time at Optima Verdana, modified for a climate that demands something the desert never does: resilience through a Chicago winter.

David Hovey Sr., FAIA has described the process directly: the team planted test beds and evaluated different plant material for over two years to ensure the plants would thrive during all four seasons, stay green all year round, and create the cascading motif the design called for. The result is a self-containing irrigation and drainage system that promotes evaporative cooling, re-oxygenates the air, reduces dust and smog levels, decreases ambient noise, and detains stormwater, a system that is simultaneously a landscape feature, a thermal insulator, an air quality improvement, and a stormwater management tool. Every terrace at Optima Verdana is maintained year-round by Optima’s own property management team, ensuring that the green promise the building’s name makes is kept in every month of the year.

Sustainability as Quality of Life

The sustainability features at Optima Verdana are not abstractions. They are the experience of living here. The green terraces mean an outdoor space that is alive and inviting on a March morning when the surrounding landscape is bare. The bird-friendly glass means a building that takes its relationship with its natural setting seriously, not just on paper but in the material choices that residents walk past every day.

At Optima Verdana, sustainability is the design philosophy expressed in its most practical form: a building that performs better, feels better, and gives back more to the environment and the neighborhood it inhabits. That is what Two Green Globes means here. And it is what the name Verdana was always meant to promise.

Experience a greener standard of living. Schedule a tour at Optima Verdana today.