Judging by looks alone, you'd never guess that the simple one-and-a-half-story house on a residential street outside Århus, Denmark, is anything more than an ordinary single-family home. The stylish little house has the broad windows and long sloping roof of a typical Scandinavian home; a trampoline sits on the neatly trimmed lawn.

But this house is different. Using ecologically benign materials, a rooftop of solar panels, and energy-scrimping designs, the house generates more than enough power to run itself.

Inside, a family of five is testing out the ultimate model home. Windows in all four walls and a slanted skylight flood the first floor with sunshine. Built-in blinds twitch autonomously to adjust to the glare, angling their slats just so. To bring in more fresh air, the skylight slides open with a hiss. "It's fun to listen to," the children report.

The family is now nearing the end of its 14-month sojourn in the Home for Life, the first prototype of a Danish concept known as an "Active House." At this point they no longer really notice the house's impressive array of technologies or its subtle machinations as it works to secure their comfort. Specialized windows, tight insulation, and a climate-control system minimize the need for electricity and heating. The sun handles the rest: Solar panels, solar thermal collectors, and the Home for Life's south-facing orientation allow the house to generate enough electricity and heat to make it carbon neutral. What's more, the use of building materials that can be produced with less energy means that the emissions from their manufacturing will be canceled out in about 40 years.

As the lead architect and project manager on this house, I worked closely with engineers, architects, and window specialists to make sure that every design decision took the energy plan into consideration and that every technical requirement was framed in terms of aesthetics and comfort. What we came up with is a design that unites low-tech and high-tech elements. Because we've never done anything like this before, we're treating it like an experiment, including a test family to help us investigate our theories.

The house is the first of eight experiments that the company I work for, VKR Holding, based in Hørsholm, Denmark, is financing in five European countries. The goal is to reinvent the home—to build a sustainable, affordable house that uses readily available technology to negate its imprint on the environment and to promote the health and comfort of its inhabitants. Our first prototype cost about US $700 000 to build, not including the design and planning. In July 2009, the Simonsen family moved in.

And so the experiment began.