This is our third Passive House. It’s a PHIUS-certified home on remote Shaw Island in the San Juan Islands. In addition to the prefabricated walls, which we did ourselves, we also prefabricated a central core that had bathrooms and a kitchen and the mechanicals. This was our first project to win some PHIUS awards.Vogel House is somewhere around our 10th Passive House, PHI-certified. A functioning farm, it had a modest budget and by this time we were on our 5th or 6th evolution of wall assemblies, foundation details, and air tightness detailing.

Projects

Because we are a two-thirds woman-owned business now, we’re able to apply for 10% of all the work Washington state has. They have to give 10% of everything they do to small minority- or women-owned businesses. So we’re partnering with larger firms to get our feet in the door to do that kind of work. It also allows us to spread Passive House, which is exciting. Our firm has been passionate about missing middle housing for quite some time and its finally coming to fruition, with a product!

Moving forward, we’re looking at partnerships.

Just as Passive House became a potent vehicle of change for the work that we do, shaping everything in our business, the promotion of women in leadership in our firm became a potent vehicle of change for our company, making us more adaptive and effective than ever before. The key to success in your company may be women promoting women, just like it was for mine.

women promoting women

As we gained momentum with our Passive portfolio, we also gained momentum as a hospitality-focused firm. Doing restaurants and bars, it turns out the attitude towards problem-solving and tenacity based around permitting isn’t just applicable to Passive House. It’s very applicable to small businesses trying to carve out their niche in the world.

women promoting women

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