The Crosby Street Hotel stresses green inside and outside.

The Crosby Street Hotel can now claim two firsts: It was the first Firmdale Hotel in the U.S. and just became the first Manhattan hotel to win Gold LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

The brainchild of Firmdale owners Tim and Kit Kemp, the Soho hotel is a new-build. U.K.-based Firmdale owns and operates a covey of similarly chic boutique hotels in London. Kit Kemp does the interior design, and being green is critical to the brand.

The notion of green also figured in the construction, which used locally sourced stone and soil, says Jakob Hansen, Crosby Street general manager. So does the way a hotel handles its rubbish.

Sourcing materials locally is important to Crosby Street Hotel General Manager Jakob Hansen.

“Do you send it to a landfill or a proper treatment plant? I’m operational,” says Hansen, who came to Crosby Street from Firmdale’s Charlotte Street site in London. “We also have a lot of green roofs. The plants you choose should be local; there’s no need to ship parsley over from Africa, for example.”

Other LEED-worthy aspects include:

• Rehabilitation of a contaminated site

• Maximum use of open space

• Enhanced refrigerant management

•Increasing reliance on grid-source and renewable energy

• Water-efficient landscaping.

“Gold certification for a hotel is particularly impressive, since hotels are notorious for high water usage for laundering and food preparation,” says Jennifer Easton, spokesperson for the U.S. Green Building Council, the LEED (leadership in energy and environmental design) accrediting agency. “The Crosby Street Hotel project has also utilized space in intelligent, sustainable ways, utilizing the rooftop as a garden and green roof, and creating a courtyard meadow with native plant species.” In an e-mail, she also commends the Crosby Street Hotel web site for providing “an educational overview of the project’s modern green features.”

Easton adds there is one other LEED-certified hotel in New York City, but it is listed as “confidential” in the USGBC data base so it cannot be identified. The Element Times Square, Starwood’s recently opened boutique hotel, has been registered for LEED certification but has not yet been certified.