Case Studies

Sections are hard to find in Wellington and are rarely flat and uncomplicated. The owner of this small and perfectly formed Passive House home heard about an upcoming subdivision at after-work drinks. The site is not tiny at 476m² but the T-bone shape and driveway and access left few options for siting the house; the legal build platform was a …

This small Passive House north of Auckland is unassuming at first glance but is in fact a project of enormous significance. It is a retrofit, which is unusual enough, but it succeeds in reaching the full Passive House level of performance rather than the more flexible EnerPHit standard for retrofits.  The Passive House designer is proud of the fact that …

Luggate’s new $5.56m community hall has been certified to the Passive House standard, the first community facility in Aotearoa to do so. It’s a notable achievement but its significance goes far beyond this milestone. Multiple challenges had to be overcome at design and construction stages. (See also this blog post, discussing insights into the process from the design team.) The …

    House Profile

    House Profile There’s much that’s noteworthy about this new townhouse in Christchurch. Many carefully considered decisions led to this, the first certified Passive House project for boutique property developers Nest Residential. This is a family home for Nest director Mark Teesdale and he used all of his experience as a property investor, developer, and urban designer to produce …

Passive House is a performance-based standard and those who used to criticise it as “something only useful in cold places like Germany” failed to grasp its relevance to all manner of different climates. Auckland (and even Northland) are still heating climates*. But Auckland’s is indubitably a mild climate by New Zealand standards and that creates a broader range of choices …

Chingford Park is a charming outlier, a newly built Passive House that echoes the past and embraces all that is technologically possible in modern times. It’s a unique result of a close and effective collaboration between a client who knew exactly what she wanted, experienced architects/Passive House designers and a building team that delivered meticulously crafted work. The modestly-proportioned two-storey, …

Here’s another significant Passive House milestone met: New Zealand’s first certified community housing project. Dunedin City Council (DCC) shares the glory with the experienced Passive House design team at Architype. This project owes a lot to the Toiora High Street co-housing development for which Architype provided architectural services. Firstly, DCC was deeply involved during that project’s long gestation period and …

Dunedin’s student housing is notoriously bad, even worse than its winters. However, a new Passive House certified apartment block smack in the middle of the student housing precinct is a stark contrast. This project was built by a private developer who was persuaded to build to a higher standard by a compelling business case. The developer has built other student …