Build Better, Live Better.

California’s modern approach to construction offers benefits to durability, energy efficiency and the healthiness of a home.

Our homes are special places. We spend the majority of our lives in our homes and they have an important role to play. They are where we might raise children or spend time with loved ones, they help to shape our values and identities, and they are financial assets that might ultimately get passed down between generations. Our homes are important structures that sustain and provide vitality to our lives. Yet despite all the advances in technology around us, the way we build our homes has remained relatively unchanged for decades. However, a growing body of building science research is now revealing compelling data about the way our homes perform, challenging the building standards and practices we have adhered to for so long. A paradigm shift is beginning to occur, creating a new concept for the 21st century home: one that is extremely durable, resilient, energy efficient, and provides for superior indoor air quality. This is a high performance home.

Dirty insulation from an older home in Coronado, CA. When we let our homes “breathe” they become air filters we cannot ever change.

We only get one chance to build our homes the right way, and what we don’t see behind the walls is just as important as what we do see from the street. For a long time, it was believed that our homes should “breathe.” In other words, homes should be constructed in such a way to allow air to pass through our floor, wall and roof assemblies freely. In reality, this legacy approach generally leads to poor outcomes in terms of a structure’s durability, energy efficiency, and indoor air quality. When we build a “leaky” structure and let our wall assemblies breathe the surrounding coastal air, not only are we letting the moisture pass through, but also dozens of other contaminants like mold spores, dust mites and pollen, not to mention all our space heating and cooling that costs money to produce. I build in Coronado, CA along the coast where older historic homes that were built from solid, 100-year-old California hardwood lumber can better tolerate our coastal conditions. Today however, homes are built using man-made, engineered wood products using young softwood trees that have little ability to absorb and release moisture safely without decaying or molding. When moist air makes its way into all the little nooks and crannies of our homes, wood becomes the perfect food and drink for decay fungi, termites and dust mites. Not only does this sound gross, but in time these invisible enemies can and will begin to break down a structure and can cause myriad health issues. 

Top: First-growth hardwood lumber from a historic Coronado home. Bottom: Young, sapling lumber from a new home in Coronado, CA. Present day lumber is far inferior to that of the past and our building practices need to take that into account.

So, what then are we to do? Current building science asserts that a far superior approach is to construct an extremely airtight building envelope, then use modern-day mechanical equipment to provide balanced, filtered ventilation and dehumidification on our terms. Once we build an environment that we can completely contain, we can begin to control it in ways we previously were unable to achieve. We can keep the lumber in our floors, walls and attics at a stable humidity level, creating museum-like conditions (how much longer would a piano last in the Smithsonian versus on the beach?). We can moderate temperature using far less energy and we can ventilate and filter the countless pollutants in our homes like VOCs, carbon dioxide, chemical particulates, pet dander, pollen, etc.  

OK, so you might be thinking: “But we live in California, and we keep our windows and doors open all the time.” Lucky for us, we are able to open our windows and doors quite often to merge our indoor-outdoor living environments. Should we stop doing this? No, of course not! I for one would probably move elsewhere if that were the case. When those conditions exist, that provides all the ventilation our homes and occupants need. However, we spend an estimated 70% of our lives in our homes and for a majority of that we actually don’t have our windows and doors open at all. I live along the coast in Coronado, CA and I would estimate that my windows and doors are closed more than half of the time my family is inside. There is a big misconception that it is 70 and sunny here, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You wouldn’t ever put a fish in a fish tank without circulating and cleaning the water, and our houses should be no different. The average person breathes over 20,000 times each day and over half the air we breathe in our lifetime will be indoors. We are now starting to realize that our buildings have an immense impact on the lives of the people in them, and we can do so much more to improve occupant wellness. This starts with changing the way we construct our building enclosures to make them airtight. 

California has already set the flywheel of change in motion, with by far the most progressive Building Standards and Energy Codes in the country and a goal for all new homes to be Zero Net Energy on the near horizon. The recently updated codes stipulate an air tightness standard, require solar panels on all roofs, call for improved indoor air quality, ventilation and filtration measures, and encourage many other high performance building solutions. This modern approach to construction is often met with resistance, skepticism and confusion by industry veterans and even building inspectors, but I believe it will provide for a wide range of positive impacts on our homes, our health and our world. 

About the author: Shane Durkin is the founder of PATRIOT High Performance Homes – a venture aimed at building homes to a higher standard of durability, efficiency, health, safety and comfort. He earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the Naval Academy, served as a Navy SEAL Officer on Coronado and earned an MBA with concentrations in finance and economics from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. For more information on high performance construction email shane@buildpatriot.com.