We’re excited to announce that pHdesign has become our latest Accelerator Partner! Founded by Hilary Padget and Anthony Harrington, pHdesign is a full-service architecture practice based in New York City. They provide sustainable design solutions for residential, commercial, and mixed-use projects. Though the firm is based in Manhattan, their portfolio includes projects up and down the East Coast and as far away as Illinois and northern Michigan (see Burnt Angle House below).

pHdesign credits their success to a marriage of modern design with functionality, beauty, and passive principles. As a result, their projects not only match the vision of their clients, they also are more energy efficient and have less of an impact on the environment.

Padget and Harrington have also recently been exploring novel ways to build high-performance, middle-income homes. As Padget explains, there is an affordable market for multifamily homes that are built to Passive House standards, as well as a market for high-end, custom homes that meet the rigors of Passive House, but very few projects that cater to middle class families. “We’re trying to fill that void,” she says.

They’ve found that forming partnerships with developers rather than functioning as service providers affords them more of a say in allocating funds and setting projects’ performance targets. This also allows them the opportunity to work more closely with manufacturers of prefabricated panelized systems and to urge them to push their limits when it comes to making a robust air barrier. A lot of manufacturers are already making products that are above code-level, and Harrington has found that that many are interested in learning how to adapt their products to make them capable of hitting Passive House levels of performance.

“They’re willing to pivot with us and that’s promising,” Harrington adds.

Ultimately, they hope this approach gives them the opportunity to create more market-rate, high-performance homes that fall within the budget of more families. They will be testing this model in a future development in the Catskills.