A beautiful lakeside LEED Platinum home

We don’t currently have plans we can offer unfortunately. There are Passive House and LEED certified prefab kit homes available that may meet your needs, other than that we would recommend you look through our building guide pages to learn high performance building techniques.

An ‘Eco Home’ could take many different forms, but they would share a few common threads. You could therefore look at home plans online for inspiration, then once you have a general design you find appealing, you could then green home building techniques to that design. We would recommend you first start with determining exactly how much space you need. In general, smaller homes use less resources and less energy than large ones, so the smaller you can build the better.

And choose your materials carefully – natural insulation materials and non-toxic building materials protect indoor air quality, and will usually pollute less during manufacturing. A green home would be an energy efficient home, so be sure to have a well-insulated building envelope.

Here is link to our Green Home Building Guide,  the Ecohome planning and design page is a great place to start, and as you get further into you planning please feel free to check back with us and post a more specific question in our advice column and maybe we can help guide you further.  

Keeping safe and non toxic indoor air in your home whether you are building a new home or renovating, is about material selection and finding natural building materials. Is this an existing house? Are you renovating or just looking to improve the air quality without much work?  It is a lot about material selection – first with materials in the building envelope such as the insulation you choose, but most important is choosing non toxic interior finishing materials. Finding Low VOC Paints, natural wood finishing oils for floors, formaldehyde free plywood instead of chipboard or particle board that are full of resins, these are your first steps. Here you a lot of pages about how to build homes for chemically sensitive people. 

How to maintain healthy clean indoor air quality in homes

We can't help too much with telling you what it will cost not knowing what you are building, but these at least will point you in the right direction. Have a look and if you have more questions let us know if you’re building, renovating or just refurnishing and refinishing to improve the air in your home.