Net Zero Projects | Residential

Evanston’s First Passive House | Evanston

This project is a certified Passive House and PHIUS ZERO home that seamlessly integrates sustainability with a modern design aesthetic within the challenging context of a listed historic district.  This right-sized home integrates a suite of resilient strategies as well as several measures to reduce its operational and embodied carbon.

While the front facade of the house is in scale with the larger, vintage homes in the neighborhood, the massing of the house is much thinner front to back, and has a one story 'L' shaped family room.  This allowed the house to minimize its presence on the lot and reduced the amount of required construction material.  The design was carefully reviewed and approved by the Evanston Preservation Commission. It had to relate to the existing neighboring homes, which ranged from 100 to 130 years old. This was accomplished by carefully aligning the design’s various design elements, heights and proportions to its neighbors.

Due to the strict Passive House requirements, the number and size of the windows had to be carefully taken into account and were positioned to maximize their impact.  This included locating windows close to perpendicular walls so that the daylight would be reflected deeper into the interior.  This can clearly be seen in the staircase image. There is a ‘light shelf’ at the rear of the house. This shades the interior from the high summer sun while allowing the low winter sun to help heat the interior. Sunlight is redirected from the top of the light shelf onto the ceiling of the family room, providing daylighting deeper into the space.  The family room ceiling is asymmetrical, providing more area for both additional PV panels on the south facing roof as well as more ceiling area for the redirected daylight to illuminate.

Combined with an EUI of 13.78, the 12.6 kW solar panels makes the home ‘Net Positive’ on an annual basis (-4.81 EUI). A future battery back up system will smooth out the solar power generation so it lasts beyond just when the sun is shining.

The home is designed to be fully accessible on the first floor.  There are three steps up to the front door, which is significantly less than the seven to eight steps found elsewhere in the neighborhood.  If there is ever a need to add a ramp for accessibility, it can be concealed into a landscape feature.  Once inside, the home's first floor is all one level, with a wider hallway and doorways that leads to an office/bedroom, and an adjacent full bath with a zero threshold shower. The home features a first floor office that can convert to a bedroom suite

Because the house is all-electric, there are no onsite CO2 emissions.  The 'fireplace' is actually a zero carbon vapor unit that gives the look of real fire using colored LED lights projected onto the water vapor. 

To address local climate related resilient design issues such as high winds, heavy rains and potential flooding, the house features oversized gutters and downspouts, hurricane straps at key structural points, a top of foundation that is 12" higher than required by code, and equipment in the sacrificial crawl space that is set well above the floor level.  

This design has won numerous design awards including an international Green Good Design award. The project was a full NextHaus Alliance collaboration.  It is a model of how high performance can be seamlessly integrated with modern architectural design. 

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