Lindsay Schack was almost a decade into her architecture career before she learned about passive houses, and that made her mad.
"Where has this been?" Schack, a principal and founder of the Rocky Mountain Northwest firm Love Schack Architecture, asked at the time. She stumbled upon the building standard while researching another project and found that it checked a lot of boxes for clients anxious about longevity for one of their biggest investments.
The highly sustainable homes are not just comfortable, quiet and healthy to live in thanks to an airtight envelope paired with careful ventilation systems, they're also high-performance, durable and energy efficient, often offering an easy path toward a net-zero home that pulls no energy from the grid.
Amid all the sustainability content she’d consumed and learning she’d tried to gain, no one had ever talked about this method. So, in 2015, Schack got certified as a passive house consultant, and “there was no going back.”
Upfront, a single-family passive house can cost about 3% to 5% more than a nonpassive house, according to decarbonization nonprofit Phius, so the projects aren't for everyone. But, even if clients didn’t want a Phius-certified passive house, the firm could still implement passive strategies that produced homes with lower energy loads, smaller carbon footprints and more grid resiliency. In short, “better buildings,” Schack said. And a better building was what homeowners Margo and Ryan Reynolds wanted.
Rising in popularity
Eyeing Bozeman, Montana, the New York-based couple hoped to build somewhere they could spend time with their two young children and host friends. They’d also spent seven years living in a multifamily Brooklyn passive house, growing enchanted by the details that made the building so comfortable.
“We really came to love it,” Ryan said. The thermally efficient space was “like this little bubble that you got to live in and that’s super comfortable but always has fresh air coming in and out.” Plus, because Montana gets “so hot in the summer, so cold in the winter — a fully insulated and efficient building” made sense, Ryan said.
Today’s passive house building strategies originated in Germany in the 1980s, and the technique is popular throughout Europe. But the design strategy remains relatively niche throughout the United States, especially in regions characterized by dramatic seasonal temperature changes. The United States got its first certified passive house project in 2003. But the standard is rising in popularity as homeowners aim to boost their residence's sustainability and life span.
Love Schack has been preaching the good word of passive house design through education and certification sessions with roughly 50 practitioners and contractors in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, according to the firm.
Love Schack started working with the Reynolds in 2020 for predesign services to evaluate lots. Considering everything from site analysis to school systems, they settled on a sloping, 4-acre parcel with views of the Bridger Range to the west, and the design team got to work.
Energy-based design
The firm worked closely with the project’s interior architect, Hannah Robertson, owner of the Rowayton, Connecticut-based studio HIR Architecture + Design, throughout the process, forming a collaborative woman-led design team to plan the 6,182-square-foot residence.
“We knew that we wanted a house that really took advantage of the views, and with a smaller footprint it would be more energy efficient,” Robertson said. So, they opted for height — not sprawl — for the expansive four-bedroom, three-story home.
With windows driving the design, Love Schack and Robertson sited the house carefully to maximize openings for windows, building along an L-shaped form that allowed them to punch up views while carefully shading these “expansive glass openings” to protect the interior excess solar exposure during the hot summer months, Schack said.
Those triple-paned windows sit snugly within the center of the home's nearly 15-inch-thick walls. Although the windows in many American homes are stuck on the outside, which makes for an easier install, nestling a window within the wall itself actually protects the windows and allows them to shield a home's interior from the elements better. The strategy also "gives a shadow relief in design to all the windows," Schack said. It's a "subtle detail" that adds "a little bit of depth to the facade."
Circulation through the design begins in the basement, a space that contains the main entrance, mudroom, and two bedrooms and adjoining bathrooms nestled in. The ground level holds the residence's living spaces: a kitchen, dining and living rooms, and an open-air patio. A central staircase rises to the second floor, where a pair of primary bedrooms with ensuite bathrooms have sweeping views to the north and south.
Influenced by strong aesthetic preferences from the Reynolds, the residence itself was modern and minimal. Honey-toned wood siding and dark metal roofing, both selected or treated for wildfire resistance, focus attention on the surrounding craggy landscape — their “borrowed landscape,” as Ryan Reynolds called it.
Overall, the design responded “to the energy needs of the home, first and foremost,” Robertson explained.
'Everything is optimized'
Delayed by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, construction on Bridger Canyon Passive Haus didn’t begin until fall 2021. In chilly Montana, the timing meant that general contractor Josh Blomquist ended up shoveling a lot of snow throughout the framing process, but he and his team worked to get the structure sealed up quickly.
And, even during the construction phase, the project took on a life as a teaching tool. Love Schack used it to host its third passive house builder training, and Blomquist toured peers and design students through the half-finished residence, pointing out some of the details that bolstered the cellulose-insulated structure’s energy efficiency.
“I love giving tours because I love talking about this,” Blomquist, the owner of sustainability-focused building firm CWJ & Associates, said. Blomquist could show how he created an airtight seal underneath the scissor trusses on the house’s roof or the strategy he developed to regulate the temperature in the mechanical room in the basement easily.
They are details that help “people understand what is possible and what they should and could be asking of the buildings they live in,” Blomquist said.
Construction on the house wrapped in 2024, and the Reynolds wouldn’t really change much about their finished project. “Everything is optimized as much as we could,” he said. “And I don’t think there’s really anything that we could’ve done much better when it comes to the fundamentals of the structure and the house and the performance. We’re really psyched about everything.”
Project Credits
Project: Bridger Canyon Passive Haus, Bozeman, Montana
Client/Owner: Ryan and Margo Reynolds
Architects: Love Schack Architecture. Lindsay Schack (lead architect); Andrea Michael (architect)
Interior Architect: Hannah Robertson, HIR Architects, Consultant
Mechanical Engineer: HVAC Guy
Structural Engineer: Stahley Engineering
General Contractor: Josh Bloomquist, CWJ & Associates
Landscape Architect: InContour
Electrical Engineer: Rocky Mountain Electric
Window Installation: Advantage Woodwork
Windows: SmartWin Windows