BUILDER, Meritage Join on reNEWable Living Concept Home

Exciting news to share with you this Monday morning.

BUILDER and Meritage Homes, an innovator in bringing highly sustainable new homes within the reach and financial means of everyday home buyers over the past seven years, will team up as partners on a new concept home that will be ready Jan. 9, 2018, in Orlando, the day the International Builders Show opens there.

The concept? The reNEWable Living Home, a pioneering venture in innovative design, engineering, materials science, and construction practices that coalesce around transforming homeownership with homes that renew, grow, change, and adapt as owners’ needs and stories evolve.

Meritage and the architecture team at BSB Design, together with a team of product manufacturers, engineers, and designers are now in the planning and permitting stages of a year-long “discovery” program that will unpack design, engineering, development, and construction platforms, process and workflows to build a reNEWable home of the future today.

“What excites me about this project is that by recombining existing and proven technologies and materials, and getting each part of the team to stretch the capabilities, features, and performance they’re each responsible for, we can bring some of what’s currently locked in the future into a real-world job site today,” Steve Hilton, CEO of Meritage says. “What’s more, we’re going to build a home we can build and sell in the real world, and the real market, so part of the innovation here is in discovering how to make some new and transformative features attainable in today’s housing market.”

To do that Meritage has to break rigid rules on what and how to build, how to work with manufacturers, materials suppliers and skilled trades, and transform its workflow models to put consumers’ needs in the center of all its processes, its LIFE. BUILT. BETTER. value proposition.

This home will morph as the human stories change across critical, time-sensitive decades of family life; its envelope structure is durable, protective from the elements, and strong; its systems feed fresh, comfortable, healthy air, its floor-plan stays nimble and adjusts for privacy, connectedness, storage, accessibility, economy, and indoor-outdoor integration. Its software consciously adapts, learns from interaction with users, pulls in upgrades, swaps out when it’s obsolete, and reinstalls as plug-and-play.

“BUILDER Concept Homes through the years have created an industry community standard for innovation and collaboration, as we all work for solutions for unmet needs in housing,” said Peter Goldstone, CEO of Hanley Wood. “This year, we’re honored to work with Steve Hilton and the Meritage team, as well as our manufacturer, materials supply, and trade partners, and our Metrostudy team in never-been-used-before practices, design collaboration and innovation to produce a home that is a demonstration in resilience and renewal.”

The BUILDER Meritage reNEWable Home will be built at The Estates of Parkside, a 110-home community ranging in price from $538,000-to-$676,000 in Orlando, FL, a short drive from the Orlando Convention Center. BSB Design, led by Dan Swift, will adapt the Granada elevation, a two-story 5,188 sq. ft. plan featuring 7 bedrooms, 5.5 baths, and 4 garages.

• The home assumes appeal to a multi-generational household, possibly first-or-second generation immigrant, priced to meet real-world Orlando market income levels (HHI of $175k), and designed to fulfill a nowadays dream of livability and real-time adaptability, offering multiple evolution-over-time options—revenue suite, in-laws suite, or adult-children suite–to its owners as well.

• The home’s finishes, features, and functionality address a need for a bold new blend of form and function to inspire families to see options, flexibility, and adaptability as part of the value they can have in a new home, as well as engineered advances in durability, performance, healthfulness, and resilience.
• The home connects practically, aesthetically, and experientially to its physical, geographical setting, with a powerful indoor-outdoor flow, deriving from a sustainable balance between home and the environment.
• The home intuitively learns and teaches its residents to use it for optimal comfort, livability, entertainment, and function.
• The home’s “software” program and community connects its residents to a vibrant self-renewing neighborhood.
• Construction materials, workflows, processes and assemblies unpack to reveal lean, efficient building technology solutions that speed construction and scale to both profitability for builders and value to new owners.

“What we mean when we talk about renewable will include new construction practices to achieve passive and active energy load management, insulated thermal mass engineering, and certifications from organizations like U.S. Department of Energy Zero Energy Ready, U.S. EPA Energy Star, WaterSense, and Indoor airPLUS certified, Florida Solar Energy Certified, Electric Power Research Institute ZERO Energy,” said C.R. Herro, vp for Energy Efficiency and Sustainability at Meritage. “The fun we’ll have with this project is in leveraging collaborative work and partnerships to bring down the costs and improve the scalability of building technologies that are doable today but at a cost-prohibitive price point. The BUILDER Meritage reNEWable Living Home will be a home Meritage will build and sell in all of its communities within the next 18 months. Buyers will find that, in total cost of ownership terms, they’re getting a great value along with the performance and livability of this home.”

To help bring to life the flexibility and nimbleness of the floor plans, we’ve challenged architects at BSB Design to imagine a multigenerational “Sandwich Generation” household, with either younger adult or older parents as the second household living in the home. BUILDER plans exclusive, proprietary research on multigenerational home buyer preference trends, and to draw on sibling company Metrostudy’s extensive knowledge base for market-based analytics on demand for this type of product.

“A lot of the learning and innovation and new ideas in this project will occur inside the walls, and it will be an honor to witness as our team deconstructs the design, development, engineering, and construction process to share that learning with other builders, vendors, and tradespeople,” said Paul Tourbaf, President of Hanley Wood’s Residential Construction Group. “We’ve had a design charrette and a couple of planning meetings, and the collaborative juices are running at a high intensity level already, so it’s going to be thrilling to see what we all can come up with.”

The core purpose of this project is simple, to build better and improve life. BUILDER and Meritage join together as a team—with manufacturer, materials, and trade partners—to unpack the design, engineering, development, and construction process and workflows to build a reNEWable home of the future today. reNEWable is the epitome of Meritage’s customer-centric, benefits-driven strategy—Life. Built. Better—and it pushes the bounds of smarter energy use, healthier homes, and houses that mindfully adapt to both residents and the environment as they both evolve.