The Green Co., a Newton-based developer, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. This is a model home in Winslowe’s View, a neighborhood of town homes that the company is building at The Pinehills, a planned community in Plymouth.

The Green Co. has built well over 2,000 homes in several Bay State communities and New Hampshire during the last five decades, but the founder of the company, Alan Green, doesn’t consider himself a builder or a developer.

“We’re creators of environments where people choose to live,” said Green, reciting a motto adopted in the early 1980s when his company developed a high-end condominium community in Newton called The Gables.

That credo appears in a framed advertisement that hangs in the Newton office of The Green Co., and it’s a philosophy that’s guided the company throughout five decades.

Alan Green was 26 years old when he led his family’s real estate business into the housing sector in 1953. “It seemed like it was an opportunity to get into another part of real estate and the housing market was just picking up steam,” said Green, who had been developing shopping centers with his brother before jumping into residential real estate.

“We originally started building small ‘starter homes’ for young and growing families and we decided that that was a highly competitive business. It was very difficult to distinguish oneself,” he said.

When new roadways improved access to Cape Cod, Green found some land and built Great Harbors, an oceanfront development of 400 single-family homes with swimming pools, tennis courts and a ball field in Falmouth that attracted families.

Green’s own family spent summers at Great Harbors. Dan Green, Alan’s younger son, fondly recalled the baseball games his father and other adults at Great Harbors organized on Sunday mornings. “I grew up there in the summers. [Great Harbors] was the first place where Alan really started creating a lifestyle,” said Dan, a vice president of the company.

The company continued development on the Cape, building Falmouthport – 210 attached condominiums in East Falmouth with amenities such as pools and a clubhouse. “It was one of the first condominiums in Massachusetts for attached housing,” said Dan.

Falmouthport was also one of the first New England communities to attract empty nesters, a phenomenon that is greatly en vogue today as more and more developers seeking to tap into the growing market of aging baby boomers have developed age-restricted communities throughout the Bay State. “[Falmouthport] was a whole different approach to things because that really hadn’t been done around this part of the country,” said Alan.

The attached housing featured in Falmouthport was also a concept that created more opportunities for the company. Building attached housing allowed for the preservation of precious green space. It also helped The Green Co. integrate architecture with the landscaping and preserve natural views, principles that guide the company to this day.

“We could be much more environmentally sensitive by building [homes] close together,” said Alan. That’s a point the company has continually pitched as a public benefit to communities, particularly in towns that have been reluctant to embrace its projects.

In an interview last week, the elder Green recalled how difficult it was to convince officials in Hingham and Newton to approve residential developments geared for empty nesters. “Those were two of the most difficult communities in the metropolitan area to get approval for anything,” said Alan, who has been a member of the Newton Conservation Commission for two decades.

“We’re asking the community to do something different; therefore we have to show that there’s a great deal of public benefit by doing that,” he said. The public benefits, according to Alan, was the creation of a housing alternative and lifestyle for aging residents who wanted to remain in the community and the preservation of as much of the natural landscape as possible.

Respect and Humor

Environmental protection and preservation has attracted a lot of attention in recent years as communities throughout the Bay State have seen open space and farmland disappear because of residential development. But while environmental sensitivity has gained publicity in the last decade or so, Dan says that “we were doing that back in the ’70s.”

Some of The Green Co. communities, for example, feature a “greenbelt” of trees and landscaping that provide a buffer from roadways and other homes. In fact, when asked to describe what distinguishes Green Co. homes, Dan uses phrases such as “privacy,” “lush landscaping” and “orientation toward the view.”

Those themes are evident at The Gables in Newton and The Meadows in Hingham. They’re also evident in some of the properties that The Green Co. repositioned for lenders and investment companies during the early 1990s. The company helped lenders like Bank of Boston, Chase Manhattan and Mutual of New York turn around properties by mostly refining the landscaping and making minor design changes.

With 65 employees and annual sales of $35 million, the company has earned national recognition. In 2001, it received the Lee Evans Award for Business Management Excellence from the National Association of Home Builders.

The award honors companies that have “exemplary business practices,” explained John Wilcox, NAHB’s executive director of business management. The Green Co. is much smaller than some of the well-known national builders, but it’s too big to be considered a small mom-and-pop operation. Mid-sized firms like The Green Co. must have “solid business systems” in place in order to succeed, said Wilcox.

“It’s not an easy place to excel in the marketplace,” he said.

The development process is another aspect that sets The Green Co. apart from competitors. The company approaches the development process in “the reverse order than most other” developers, explained Dan Green.

“We first look at a piece of undeveloped land and we look for the environmentally sensitive areas – and say those will remain in the natural scheme. And we look for the ideal areas to build, the ones with the views, and site homes for privacy,” he said.

“Then we go work with land planners on how to site the homes so that they won’t look at other homes. In our neighborhoods, it’s more private than any single-family subdivision,” said Dan. “There’s no two homes that look directly at each other because we control the whole land. We site the homes so that they’re focused toward the views.”

But besides the development process, the company’s culture and philosophy is also part of the critical mix. “I think the philosophy that [Alan has] created within our company … is respect,” said Dan.

The respect starts with the employees, according to Dan, who noted that there are several employees who have worked for the company for more than 20 years, including a receptionist who will turn 90 shortly.

Having a good sense of humor also appears to be prerequisite for working at The Green Co. Going through a set of slides highlighting some of the company’s projects last week, Dan paused over a few slides featuring employees. Some of the slides feature employees who have been the victims of office practical jokes, including an architect who walked into his office on April Fools’ Day to find Styrofoam peanuts, the kind used as packing material, piled almost waist-high covering his workspace.

There’s also a slide of employees creating a giant papier-maché Easter egg that was displayed along with large rabbit footprints in a surprised co-worker’s front yard.

The respect to which Dan referred also extends to customers. The company established a customer service system that includes a homebuyer’s guide on how the construction process works and how to care for the home once the owner moves in. The builders also walk through the homes with buyers several times during the construction process, and they do follow-up surveys to gauge customer satisfaction and find out what changes are necessary.

Even today, Alan Green calls homebuyers who have reserved a home to ask them how they found out about the company and what they liked about the residences. Alan, who focuses on sales and marketing, refers to himself nowadays as “just an employee.”

Dan, who joined the company in 1988 after working briefly at JP Morgan in New York City and considering job opportunities in real estate, said he never felt any pressure to work in the family business. “I never felt forced to come into the business. It was an opportunity that was presented,” said Dan. But Dan is quick to point out that he wasn’t just handed a company position; he had to earn it.

Dan remembered how he started working for the family business when he was just a teen-ager. “I was cleaning out catch basins,” he said with a laugh. “I started at the bottom of the company.”

Dan’s older brother, Tony, was a former principal of the company, but in the late 1990s he became one of the managing partners of The Pinehills, a development in Plymouth that will feature nearly 3,000 homes, golf courses and commercial space once it is completed. The homes are priced from the low-$300,000 range to close to $2 million.

The Green Co., one of eight developers building homes at The Pinehills, developed the first neighborhood in the Plymouth project. Called Forest Edge, the 43-unit development features mostly detached single-family homes with some attached homes. It sold out in a little over a year.

The company is currently working on Winslowe’s View, townhouse condominiums with 1,550 square feet to 3,000 square feet of living space overlooking one of the golf courses. Winslowe’s View features its own village green, which has swimming pools and an old-fashioned post office with penny candy and ice cream. Once it’s finished, Winslowe’s View will include about 500 homes. Some 114 homes have already been sold, and 96 are now occupied.

“I think that [Winslowe’s View] really emphasizes everything about our company, in terms of how we use the land. There’s lots of topography out there. We were able to site [the houses] in such a way that we really worked with the land,” said Alan.