Home green home
Consultant honored as National Professional Women in Building Member of the Year
When National Association of Home Builders’ Professional Women in Building honored Marla Esser Cloos earlier this year for dedicated volunteer work, she was caught without a local PWB council.
The Oklahoma City native helped start one in St. Louis a few years ago, and had helped revive others, but when the group named her its 2017 National Professional Women in Building Member of the Year, she was back in Oklahoma City, which had none.
She soon helped remedy that, and is now president of the resurrected PWB Council of Central Oklahoma Home Builders Association.
The blur may highlight more than anything the energy she has poured not only into her career, but in nurturing and strengthening those around her.
As owner and president of Green Home Coach/Sustaining Spaces in Edmond, Esser Cloos, 56, works as a consultant with homeowners and others to create healthy, sustainable
living spaces.
Her aim, according to greenhomecoach.com, is “to empower people, especially women, in their homes and families by sharing how green and sustainability offers a safer, healthier and more comfortable home.”
“I have three passions: women, green and home,” she said. “I get all three through my work to some degree, and then I get women and home space through PWB.
“Actually, I find a lot of women are more in tune with the whole concept of green because we care about health and wellness so much — you know, ‘Mama Bear: Don’t mess with mine.’ ”
Esser Cloos attended Heritage Hall before an engineering scholarship lured her away to Washington University in St. Louis. She lived there for about 30 years, working first for IBM and then later starting her own companies.
She learned about green building in St. Louis while working with a former IBM colleague in energy consulting.
“Ironically, when I got into the industry, I thought that I had come home,” she said.
Her waste-not-want-not grandmother, she realized, was a major influence. So was an incident years earlier, when her daughter suffered a major allergic reaction.
“In researching what had happened to her, I started discovering how many chemicals were in the stuff we were using around the house,” she said. “That really led me to start getting the chemicals out of our own home and out of the stuff we were using. That really started my personal green journey.”
With green building firmly on her radar, Esser Cloos also joined the Home Builders Association of St. Louis and Eastern Missouri. That led to a trip in 2010 to the International Builders Show in Las Vegas, where she stumbled onto a Women in Professional Building Panel.
“I loved what they had to say,” she said. “I don’t even remember the topic, but I walked up to one of the ladies afterward, and I said, ‘What are you guys up to? This is pretty cool.’ ”
She soon was serving as a St. Louis-area trustee for the national group, which led to her founding the St. Louis council.
‘A sisterhood’
When marriage brought her back to Oklahoma City in 2016, Esser Cloos immediately sought out new opportunities to network and get involved.
“The first year here was so weird,” she recalled. “I’d been involved with so many things in St. Louis. I’d helped found organizations, had done a lot of things around women and around entrepreneurship.”
This led her to organizations such as the REI Women’s Business Center.
“I started going to their monthly business meetings to meet people and to meet other women who were in business,” she said. “I actually made some friends and ended up hiring several people, but that has been a great resource.”
Esser Cloos keeps educating others through her work, podcast and book, “Living Green Effortlessly: Simple Choices for a Better Home,” which won an Independent Book Publishers Association Benjamin Franklin Award in 2017.
But PWB occupies a special spot in her world. The group is gearing up for its first signature project, Build My Future, which is set for next spring. The one-day career fair is designed to show students the many careers available in and around the business industry.
“What’s cool is it’s just a sisterhood because we’re the voice of women in the building industry, and I met these cool women,” she said. “It was kind of like having a work sorority especially since we’re in a guys’ world. I’ve been in a guys’ world most of my life — engineering school, IBM, technology, so construction really fits.”