photo: Dan Scott
Moving from the UK to New Zealand he had been immediately shocked at the state of most of the housing.
“We had our first child. We were living in a cool little granny flat in Murray's Bay, five minutes from the beach,” he explains. “But it was minimum code. It was 10 degrees in winter with a heater in the same room. It was 35 degrees in summer, with all the windows open and fans going. Then mouldy and horrible in the middle.”
The shock turned to dismay when his young children became ill because of it.
Already trained as a registered architect, he took direct action. He trained up as a certified Passive House designer – the famously rigorous approach to building performance. He designed and built his own home to the highest Homestar 10 rating. And, at around $2,600+GST per square metre, he only spent as much as you normally would to meet the standard building code.
Begun in 2020, the 7-month project became a model he could use to demonstrate his ability to help others.
“Within four weeks of moving in, the kids didn't need inhalers anymore,” he says. That was proof enough to base a career on.
Joe now leads his own company, WEL Architecture. He's a Registered Architect, Certified Passive House Designer and Homestar Assessor and Trainer. He’s the current chair of the Passive House Institute of New Zealand.
These days he’s also keen to challenge the key barriers to uptake of passive house and high-performance home design. They include fears about purists, unnecessarily complex designs, and high build costs.
“A lot of people think of passive house as quite black and white,” he admits, “But I'm very much grey. While Passive House performance is the end goal, if somebody can put some cheap 3M film on their windows and it means they have to put less heating in their house and can better afford their living costs, that’s great. It’s a journey, and I want to support everyone, no matter where they are on the path”
“It’s also very much about reducing waste, which also reduces costs, which also reduces impact through clever design.”
One of the keys to achieving so much with so little budget-wise is for clients to consider swapping some footprint size for performance.
“New Zealanders build the third biggest homes on the planet. We don't need things that big. Let's go smaller. Let's go cleverer,” he advises. “I started my career doing loft extensions in little Georgian terraces in London, trying to fit in two bedrooms and a bathroom. We can do a lot with not much space sometimes. And New Zealanders are beginning to come around to that sort of thing.”
He’s an enthusiastic proponent of what some call “integrated design”. Although he’s more likely to translate it as “making sure everyone knows what they’re doing”.
“I get all of the sub consultants like the sparky and the plumber and the builder together before the project starts on site. We talk through all the details and the drawings. We make sure everybody's on board with what we need to do, and understands the impact of their area of work, whether it’s on airtightness, thermal performance, etc.”
He’s still shocked at how few housebuilders do this.
His other key tool is detailed modelling of home performance as part of the design process. These days that means harnessing an increasing range of tools to check things throughout the design and build, to ensure the required outcomes are actually achieved.
“There’s no excuse for poor performance through bad design. We need to think about how the building is orientated, and how it responds to the site using best practice design principles. But then you can check those decisions with modelling and monitoring. If you're not checking, every single client is a crash test dummy. You don't know how the build is going to perform.
“The Passive House and Homestar process has energy modelling in the design stage to enable you to check you're making the right decisions. Are you putting in enough insulation or too much? Could you use less if you did something else here? Do you need the highest spec windows, or will more cost-effective ones still work? It’s all about balance”
And ultimately, it’s all about providing families with healthy homes to enjoy, just like his own.
“My connection with my clients is the most important thing to me,” says Joe. “It's about what the client wants. It's not about ticking a Passive House box or ticking a Homestar box, it’s about ensuring that they will end up with a comfortable, low energy, healthy home. Throughout this process it’s about the relationships, with the contractor, client and consultants. Because building a house is a stressful thing. You need to make sure you're going to get along no matter what the ups and downs.”