Lessons Learned: Here Are Five Critical Take-Aways From The 2020 BUILDER Concept Home

Balance.

The term—as either a noun or a verb—speaks to precisely equal measures that offset one another, in mass, in volume, in impact, in any number of elements, physical or theoretical.

We also feel it, we sense it, we know balance, when it’s there and when it’s missing.

Balance--in its mathematical physical world meaning, and in the sense of comfort humans experience when they spend time at home—brought people from around the world together to design, engineer, and build Chōwa, Sekisui House and Woodside Homes’ very first demonstration of Japan-based Sekisui House’s SHAWOOD process in North America.

Hear Sekisui House, Ltd., Marketing General Manager Norio Adachi on what bringing Chōwa to the United States market means to Sekisui House, its leaders, its partners, and its worldwide team of associates.

Thanks to this global team of architects, engineers, building scientists and technologists, and a squad of local trade crews, interior, and landscape designers, Chōwa is now open for view in the Las Vegas masterplan community of Summerlin.

The home--a 5,400 square-foot Buddhist-temple inspired contemporary--at the foot of the majestic Red Rock Canyon, with a backyard, post-card view of the Vegas skyline, achieves balance in ways never seen before in American home building.

For a deep-dive into the architecture, planning, exclusive construction techniques, consumer research, and building science behind Chōwa, download our White Paper here.

The home’s symmetries—its balance—come crystal clear with that orientation, that footprint, which invites all of the natural world’s splendor in from one side and the magic and energy of Las Vegas’s style of high-test urban fun and entertainment on the other.

Those elements, and the way indoor and outdoor living equalize one another in the life of Chōwa’s residence, as well as the live-vs.-work, connect-vs.-enjoy solitude, play-vs.-sleep, dynamics that carry through the wide open central living, the cadenced hallways, and the separate living, sleeping, and work areas, etc. of balance are no accident.

Fact is, that simple harmony, that blend of equally offsetting elements of protection, sanctuary, connectiveness, and belonging, that rarest form of serene equilibrium make up the core of intention that brought the home to life on its site in Summerlin’s Ridges neighborhood.

Now that all of the pomp and glamour of CES and IBS have run their course, it’s time to take an objective look at the five critical “lessons-learned” that emerge out of an all-star team’s work together on an astonishing pursuit of balance, resulting in Chōwa.

1. A business culture whose core operating value is “love of humanity.” After a 60-year run whose focus was on building safety and then designing and engineering comfort, Sekisui House’s bold new promise has committed to no less than to make home “the happiest place in the world.” For U.S.-based firms—builders, developers, capital sources, manufacturers, distributors, etc.—this is a real-world object lesson in stakeholder values in action. Doing good and doing well as an enterprise become one. Balance.
2. A design and development process that emphasizes principles over rules, encouraging and rewarding open collaboration, kaizen pursuit of improvement, and unified purpose around a shared outcome. This emphasis right-sizes egos and promotes team accountability. The consequence? A rare balance between expert knowledge and open-mindedness to learning and discovery, which is particularly key to unlocking opportunity in the Generation X adult customer segment U.S. builders pay so little attention to up to now.
3. The SHAWOOD “secret-sauce.” Without physical world structure that lasts, protects, and withstands nature’s sometimes ferocious temperament, balance would only be a fantasy. SHAWOOD is Sekisui House’s exclusive blend of raw materials—namely glue-laminated timber, process, precision-manufacturing, and mechanical design that results in nearly perfect squares and plumb lines, Lego-like assembly on site free of circular saws, and structures that balance high-performance structural strength, function, and beauty. SHAWOOD’s posts and beams, each numbered to a specific, unique location in the home’s enclosure, tightly connect in metal jointed brackets, secured with a simple metal peg that hammers smoothly into a perfectly-milled cylindrical slot. The result? Structural balance, even when a SHAWOOD home endures seismic or super storm stress.
4. The Bellburn exterior cladding. Ceramic pots are Japanese traditional artwork from ancient era, and Bellburn—another first for use in North America--is manufactured with the same craftsmanship mentality. Bellburn’s color does not come from coating the surface but by directly baking the glaze. This produces a very distinctive surface and the color will not fade and stay throughout the lifespan of the product, which is 60 years. Porcelain secures intensity by baking in high temperature, which in reverse can cause contraction. Bellburn is manufactured and quality controlled at Sekisui House’s in-house factory using the leading-edge equipment to achieve the dimensional contraction tolerance of ±１㎜. Bellburn is baked in a high temperature which prevents any heat transfer into the house up to 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit.
5. The power of builders. In a first in North America for a balance of indoor room comfort and indoor air quality, the Chōwa team worked with three manufacturers to develop a way for their respective indoor air quality and room comfort systems to talk with one another in a seamless solution. The DARWIN Home Wellness Intelligence platform provides air quality sensors to monitor indoor air pollutants. And the home also includes Panasonic Cosmos™ Healthy Home System which automatically ventilates indoor air quality 24/7 to maintain a healthy environment for all family members, together with a Daikin air-conditioner. The builders Sekisui House and Woodside Homes, in this instance, drove interoperability, which provides a balance among isolated systems into a single solution for the customer’s well-being.

“Our investment in innovative technology can directly impact better living for our residents, and our people take pride in being able to do that,” says Sekisui House, Ltd., Marketing General Manager Norio Adachi. “This is true not just for the technology and engineering side of the company, but among all of our design, construction, sales, marketing, and planning associates. They can take pride in seeing their contributions result in better living and a better society. They can visualize that big story together, and it leads to happy, purpose-filled employees.”

That’s the greatest “take-away” lesson of all from this important pursuit in the Chowa-Living In Balance initiative.