Teaching Homeowners How Their House Works – GreenBuildingAdvisor

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What we hand over on day one, what we learn a year later, and how both change the next project

We spend years designing a high-performance house, and it is too easy to skip the important final step of the process—describing to the homeowners what to expect and how to interact with their new home. In any project, but especially a high-performance one, it can never just be the routine of walking the mechanical room, handing over the binder, shaking hands, and leaving. The client is moving into a building that, in many cases, behaves unlike anything they have lived in before.

When we do attempt to brief the client on their new home, we often make the mistake of describing the house instead of explaining how to run it. Clients are typically not familiar with concepts like continuous balanced ventilation, filtration degradation, or the idea that a well-made building envelope holds its temperature. It’s our responsibility to provide the information they need to interact with their home without overwhelming them with building physics. Lots of effort went into the design and construction of a building that “just works”—it just works a bit differently than buildings they may be used to.

We spoke to two past clients about the handoff, what we can learn from them, and how we can apply this information to future projects.

One project is a gut renovation of a mid-1800s Cobble Hill brownstone that is Passive House–certified. A two-story rear extension evened out the proportions of an existing narrow four-story addition, passive detailing let us pull the mechanicals away from the windows in the primary bath, and the cellar went from unfinished storage to a speakeasy with a full bar and a musical entertainment space, accessed via a hidden door in a bookshelf. The owner has now lived there for six years.

Our Cobble Hill brownstone hidden space behind the…