Custom Home: Clark Road Passive House
Custom Home: Clark Road Passive House
Date: 2020
Location: Squamish B.C.
We were given the amazing opportunity to design and build Squamish’s first single family certified Passive House. As a 2024 Georgie Awards Winner for best custom home under $1M, this build is a project we are particularly proud of. This was an exciting dream that came to fruition. Passive House has been an area of focus for Mike and the Blue Water Team for over 5 years. When our clients approached us after seeing our Diamond Head project back in 2018, they inquired if we knew anything about Passive House. It was music to our ears!
We teamed up with Pierre from Mizu Passive House who acted as our Passive House Consultant and we began to embark on an exciting new design process. The lot we were building on posed many challenges being in the flood zone, having less than ideal soil and it was also quite a compact lot. We worked together to navigate these challenges and came up with a beautiful design that checked off all the boxes on our clients wish list. It also, most importantly, reached Passive House Certification and looks gorgeous at the same time.
Our Blue Water Team consists of 5 Certified Passive House Tradespersons. We believe this is just one of the many reasons why this build is incredibly air tight and the attention to detail is outstanding.
We truly hope this project is the first of many Certified Passive Houses to go up in Squamish, and that we are granted with the opportunity to build them.
Discover more of our work and other stunning builds here: See Our Projects
What The Client Is Saying
Having undertaken a number of major renovations over the years and experienced the escalating costs and unpredictability of this process we decided to opt for building a home from scratch. We had seen a Bluewater project going up locally and were impressed with the design and efficiency of the build not to mention the extremely tidy organized site, always a good sign in our experience. Once we met Mike Van Capelle the owner and understood his passion for Passive housing and ultra efficient building processes we undertook to build the first single family occupancy passive house in Squamish with Bluewater concepts. If you want to work with a great team of people who represent the owners clear philosophy for honesty, integrity, incredible attention to detail and a responsible approach to the environment then Bluewater are a great fit. So many contractors in our experience under-estimate jobs in order to secure a client. What follows is a continuous process of renegotiation throughout the build creating stress and a breakdown of trust. Mikes honesty and integrity don’t allow him to do that so although the initial quote may seem higher than the competition it is in fact absolutely not and importantly helps him maintain very healthy working relationships with clients. The build was complex but Mike came in on budget not even allowing Covid to compromise his promises. We are extremely happy with the quality and design of our Passive house and know we were very lucky to have worked with Bluewater Concepts.
- David Simmonds