A couple of years ago, I had the zany idea that I wanted to open a home furnishings store. It didn’t quite come from thin air: I was a graphic designer who had been unofficially studying interior design for some time, and I had recently had some success in designing the logo and interiors for a posh boutique. It was then that I began giving serious consideration to retail. The idea of moving from a business where my clients felt justified in calling me at home at midnight or six in the morning, to one where I could focus good energy on a customer experience that lasted a few minutes seemed highly desirable.

The thing was, if I was going to start a new business, it had to conform to my values. Though I wanted to open a store, I’m no fan of mindless consumerism. I was primarily interested in home furnishings because I had seen how a person’s surroundings could affect his or her mood and experience of life, but as I started looking into other aspects of that field, the ideas of healthy interiors and eco-friendly materials also started to resonate.

To offer a quick summary of what I learned, the way people furnish and decorate their homes in the modern world is quite literally sickening, both to the home itself and the world in general. Obviously, there’s the problem of all the trees cut down so people can have their nice wood furniture and flooring. But the manufacture of most paint, upholstery, rugs, bedding—basically every kind of thing people put in their homes—involves poisonous chemicals that get sprayed into the environment or dumped from factories. And then when these products come into your home, they release residual amounts of these chemicals into the air in a process called outgassing. Studies have shown that this outgassing, combined with the fumes from chemical cleaning products and other pollutants, can cause the air in your home to be five times more polluted than the air outside . . . and in some cases up to twenty times more. And there is plenty of evidence that the chemicals that make up this interior pollution are linked to health problems in people, especially children.

In order to decorate our homes, we are in essence poisoning our personal environments, as well as the natural environment.

Again and again while I conceptualized my future business, after taking all of this information to heart, the idea of health kept coming up. Healthy homes, healthy bodies, healthy families, healthy environment, healthy neighborhoods, healthy society, healthy planet. With what I was learning about manufacturing and the potential for small businesses to affect their local environments, the convergence of all of those concepts was becoming obvious.

What if I started a business that was built entirely upon those principles? Our operations would be eco-friendly, our products would be eco-friendly, our employees would receive a living wage and insurance benefits. Bringing our products home would contribute to a customer’s healthy home and body. And why not go a step further and create a place where a healthy community could flourish? I started expanding on the idea of strictly offering home furnishings and decided to put in a little café in the front of the store, that offered organic products and, possibly more importantly, a place for community to gather.

This was a business that would be all about life. I wanted to challenge people to think about what that concept meant to them, and about how their lives are interdependent upon the lives of other people and organisms on the planet. Getting a broader picture of that interdependence can be overpowering in many ways, but I wanted to show people that they could enhance the enjoyment and health they get out of their own lives while at the same time lowering their overall impact on the planet.

But anyway, that’s how bluehouse first came to life in my mind. Today, we are a seven thousand square-foot home furnishings store located near the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, Maryland and on the web at www.bluehouseLIFE.com. We sell furniture, home décor, eco-friendly hardwood and bamboo flooring, bathroom counters and sinks, linens, bedding, mattresses, pillows, body products, baby products, and all kinds of gifts . . . all of it conforming to our strict guidelines for health and sustainability. Our little café is thriving much of the time, and our furniture showroom has won two “Best of Baltimore” awards from local publications during our first year of operation.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to share with you some thoughts about running a small business in general, and the extra rewards and challenges in running this particular business in a “green” and healthy way.