Maria’s Passive House is in select company whichever way you look at. Few New Zealand Passive projects are rural; only three are certified to Premium performance; it’s believed to be the country’s only off-grid Passive House; and it was designed and built by its owner, Steve Hughes of Build Good Architecture.
This minor dwelling is a vital stage in comfortably housing an intergenerational family in a remote Coromandel location. It’s also the launching pad for a new career direction for Steve. He completed an architecture degree 25 years ago, but didn’t want to be an architect by the time he graduated. He stayed in construction, working as a project manager for a main contractor and later on the client side. Steve played a key role in some big, complex projects.
But he and his wife Amy eventually grew tired of Auckland’s rat race and they bought nearly 4.5 ha of steep land near Tairua at the end of 2019. Following a time-honoured tradition of staged building on rural sites, Steve and family (and two small dogs) have been living in a succession of tiny homes. The first step was a wee 30m2 high-performance cabin. Currently used as a bedroom, it will become Steve’s office eventually. His daughter and niece have their own sleep out. The 60m2 home which has just won Passive House Premium certification is currently the living space for the whole family but was built with Steve’s mother-in-law in mind. Steve’s design achieved a Lifemark 4 rating, a smart move and one with an immediate reward too: Thames District Council allowed the building an extra 10m2 on top of the size cap for minor dwellings.
Steve’s interest in Passive House was sparked by an enquiry from a client whose apartment building design was being impacted by the rising standards set by Healthy Homes. Every single apartment would now need a 5kW heat pump. He called Steve: what is that small print exemption for certified Passive House buildings all about? That led to Steve doing the Passive House designer course with Kara Rosemeier in 2020, right as they were packing up their life in Auckland.
Steve feels his construction background definitely helped him with the Passive House training. He’d spent nearly 10 years with Fletcher Construction and on projects like hospitals and high-level university laboratories: ducting and mechanical ventilation weren’t foreign concepts. “A PC3 lab, what goes on in there won’t kill you but it will make you sick. The labs are tested for air leakage,” he says. “The concepts translated to Passive House.”
With land of their own and a house to build, Steve and Amy saw the opportunity to create a career pivot too. Steve undertook architectural and Passive House design on the minor dwelling and is working toward registration as an architect. He’s a LBP Design 3. He was also hands-on on site, working alongside a local carpenter he engaged on a labour-only contract. Work began in August 2021 and the family moved in seven months later.
They expect to spend another year in the minor dwelling. Steve has been busy designing the main house, a much larger home. At time of writing, it’s at developed design stage and is being reviewed by the engineers and Formance, who are supplying SIP.
“The next house could achieve Premium too, although I haven’t finished running the numbers,” says Steve. “Generation targets will be easily met and PER demand should be well within the Premium requirement. It’s interesting to see comments on my LinkedIn posts, that reaching Premium [certification] is really hard. That’s not my experience. But we’re definitely advantaged by being in the Auckland climate zone. Also, this is not a tiny site in the city; we’ve got plenty of room for a lot of PV panels.”
Steve undertook the first designPH training offered by Sustainable Engineering Ltd. “It was so good. I’d used designPH previously, I could already get results that made sense when exported to PHPP. But within the first two sessions, Jason [Quinn] had already improved my workflow and understanding of designPH. The following four sessions were a bonus. designPH is an incredibly powerful tool and it was a really good course—nicely paced and a good level of content.”
Steve now designs using designPH and exports the results to PHPP. Exploring different window scenarios in designPH to get an idea of what works best has been particularly useful on the latest project.
Steve is convinced of the value of self-sufficient solar. “We’re more resilient here compared to being grid-tied in a city. Back when we lived in Auckland, a pole transformer went out in Ponsonby. It only took out 20 houses, ours among them, [but it took a long time to fix]. After we moved here, a transformer tripped in Kopu. That took out power across the whole Coromandel peninsula and half of Hauraki Plains.”
His advice for new building projects? “Look to see what solar you can afford to put in, include batteries and make it scalable so you can upgrade the system over time.”