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Metropolis Editors, Natural Habitat, sustainability, sustainable architecture

METROPOLIS Introduces Natural Habitat, a Sustainable Homes Video Series

The series debuts with a tour of a tranquil upstate New York retreat designed with Passive House principles.

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A Meshmatics chandelier from Moooi anchors the living room of this Brooklyn townhouse, renovated and updated by Ingui Architecture to Passive House standards.

July 19, 2024

A Passive House Renovation Makes This Historic Townhouse More Livable

The Passive House certification standard helped Ingui Architecture upgrade the quality of a Brooklyn home, opening the door to a host of other benefits.

By: Sam Lubell

Photography: Adam Kane Macchia

 MUCH OF THE WORK NEEDED to achieve Passive House standards is invisible. And that’s a benefit. The technical work remains in the background, creating seamless architecture that is not just energy efficient but filled with light, fresh air, and healthy living. 

This phenomenon is exemplified by Ingui Architecture’s townhouse in Brooklyn, New York, for Chad Dickerson, executive coach and former Etsy CEO, and his family. The four-story, historic brick house appeared healthy when seen from the street but required substantial alterations within. Air and water leaked, floors were out of level, cracks emerged, energy costs were high, and winter freezing was making it much worse. The architects’ response was intensive, although its manifestations were subtle. 

“I don’t even think about the fact that we live in a passive house until we get our energy bill every month and I feel good,” jokes Dickerson. 

Ingui Architecture and its team of contractors and consultants removed the entire roof, repaired it, and re-insulated it with exterior rigid foam boards with inboard dense-pack cellulose. Now the only evidence of this intervention is large skylights, which flood the house—particularly its curving, open central stairway—with natural light. “It’s subtle, low-key stuff, but it makes such a huge difference,” notes Michael Ingui, president at Ingui Architecture. 

For the residence’s walls, the team rebuilt and sealed crumbling brick masonry, installed triple-pane windows, inserted dense-pack cellulose and mineral wool insulation, and eliminated thermal bridges by holding jambs off the wall and replacing galvanized steel tiebacks with wooden joists. The team installed a multistory addition in back and lowered the cellar’s concrete slab three feet, insulating it with rigid foam. 

Ingui Architecture was able to maximize the daylight throughout the home through generous windows and other openings, both within the original structure and in this addition at the back of the home

As a result, the home has a quiet, serene feel, accentuated by subtle changes like larger thresholds, freer-flowing plans, and sizable windows. With its tight, efficient envelope and rooftop solar panels, it has achieved Passive House certification. And its excellent energy performance, says Ingui, opened the door for more ambitious changes. “Once you see that you don’t need that much heat, you realize you don’t need a boiler. The next question becomes, am I okay with an induction stovetop? Or can I get enough hot water for my family with a heat-pump hot-water heater?” He sums up: “Once you’ve built the better box you can do a lot of new things.”

Dickerson, who says his family uses the heat only for about five or six hours each winter (the steady temperatures help his several guitars stay in tune, he adds), eventually opted to go all-electric, including an induction range, an electric ERV filtering system, a heat-pump water heater and dryer, and a VRF HVAC system. He also committed to reusing joists and employing low-VOC materials and mostly water-based paints. Dickerson is especially pleased with the home’s contribution to his family’s health and well-being. They seem to get sick less, he notes, and when smoke from Canadian wildfires blanketed the city in the summer of 2023, the interiors registered virtually no change. 

A multistory addition at the back of the home created the space for a secondary kitchen in the family area and access to the backyard. The home is all-electric, so the oven here and the range in the primary kitchen from Fisher Paykel don’t run on gas.

“It blows my mind just how good the air is in the house all the time,” says Dickerson, who calls himself a “numbers guy” and likes to check the data on air quality and energy savings regularly. 

The one exception to the home’s seamless, subtle changes is the cellar, which is now a kind of speakeasy music venue, accessed from above via a swinging bookcase. It has a moody, intimate vibe, with dark-gray walls, a timber bar, accent lighting, exposed brick and wood surfaces, and musical instruments collected in an informal stage performance area. 

This super-sustainable home has some delightful secrets—like this bookcase that is actually an entryway into the bar and entertainment space in the cellar.

Ingui, whose firm has worked on several passive house projects, founded the Passive House Accelerator, a platform for sharing ideas in Passive House design and construction. He says his “secret sauce” is close collaboration with clients, and in this case his team met with Dickerson every week. “No matter how well we draw these, we are always tweaking things,” he says. “As long as the client is on board, we can pull it off.” 

For Dickerson, choosing a passive house was easy once he learned more about the program. Because he already had to perform a gut renovation, the difference between passive and conventional in terms of cost and time was negligible. But the difference in quality of life has been exponential. “Once we committed to Passive House it didn’t affect our lifestyle at all except in a positive way,” he says. 

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