Belfast, Maine–based design/build firm GO Logic has been constructing energy-efficient custom homes in New England for nearly 10 years. As a green-building pioneer, the firm was meeting the rigorous Passive House standard before many U.S. builders had ever heard of it.
Project Details
Project: GO Home
Location: Available throughout the Northeastern U.S.
Designer/Builder: GO Logic, Belfast, Maine
Size: 600 square feet to 2,500 square feet
Cost: $170,000 to $567,000 (not including land)
After eight years of field testing, the firm has incorporated its contemporary farmhouse style and efficient construction practices into its newest product: the GO Home, a production-style line of homes built to the Passive House standard and manufactured through a panelized, prefabrication process in GO Logic’s factory. The homes can now be shipped and built outside of Maine.
“We developed a line of homes that comes out of [custom] designs that we did for individuals in the past that seemed to work really well, so we made them a standard issue,” says Alan Gibson, co-founder and partner at GO Logic. “We do custom architecture, but the idea behind the GO Homes platform is that these houses are predesigned, so there isn’t need for a lot of architecture work to be done, which keeps costs lower and allows us to prefabricate the shell of the building.”
Trent Bell Photography
The GO Home line offers one- and two-story plans ranging from 600 square feet to 2,500 square feet, with layouts that include up to four bedrooms. (The 1,700-square-foot model is shown here.) The base price for a GO Home in Maine ranges from $179,000 to $567,000 (prices outside of Maine vary based on local building costs), and from start to finish the entire design and build process takes about nine months.
“Everyone wants a custom house and wants to design something from the ground up, but not everyone can afford that,” says Gibson, adding that the process of building a GO Home still offers a lot of flexibility for clients. “We have a list of standard options and finishes clients can choose from, and if anyone wants to deviate from those they can.”
The design of the homes isn’t based on aesthetic preferences alone, Gibson says. Passive house requirements come into play as well.
Trent Bell Photography
“The idea of passive house design is quite simple—it’s a box, and you don’t have a lot of jigs and corners because corners lose more heat,” he explains. “You also don’t want to have a super sprawling, one-story shape because you’re going to lose more energy if you have more surface area, so those kinds of things make a big difference.”
That doesn’t mean traditional-looking passive houses are not possible, but Gibson notes that certain contemporary design details better lend themselves to energy efficiency.
“If you have a site that’s good for solar gain and you want to maximize that, then you wouldn’t install little double-hung cape windows with divided lites, for example, because you’re going to get a fraction of the solar gain going through that glass,” he says. “It just so happens that a bigger, clear piece of glass for a window is usually cheaper, has better energy performance, and is also more contemporary in design.”
Trent Bell Photography
GO Home’s interiors feature low-emission finishes, zero-VOC paints, and formaldehyde-free plywood.
The air- and water-tight shell of each GO Home is assembled on-site; the firm says it has shipped panels as far as New York state for about $6,000. The exterior walls incorporate two layers of dense-pack cellulose and mineral wool insulation for an R-value of 50. With such a tight building envelope, the homes require a continuous fresh-air ventilation system to reduce moisture buildup and keep indoor air fresh.
Overall, the houses use 80% less energy compared with a standard, code-compliant home in Maine. The cold, snowy state was an appropriate setting for the GO Home’s launch, Gibson says. “The passive house concept works the best in cold climates because you have so much more to gain,” he says. “Any energy improvement has a bigger impact in an extreme climate than in a milder climate.”
