By Jay Fox

For more than a decade, 475.Supply had been a scrappy startup renting a small, single-story space in Brooklyn. Like many of the other light industrial buildings on the block, the exterior was windowless and accessible through a heavily graffitied garage door. Casual passersby would have had no idea that behind this rough exterior was a team driven by a mission to build like the future depends on it by learning how to properly use and install an ever-growing catalog of high-performance building products. Each new partnership brought in more products that the 475 team had to learn how to use, and the space became a testing ground where many of these items were assessed or even installed before being offered to customers.

“A GC could walk in, and you just point and say, ‘This is how you install the tape,'” says Brink Team Manager at 475.Supply Gabrielle O’Grady.

Though it was an ideal incubator for a startup, the team at 475 recognized that they were outgrowing the building, and so they purchased what would become their new headquarters in 2023. Located just six blocks from 475’s previous Brooklyn headquarters near the Gowanus Canal, the new location at 369 Warren Street was a mix of brick and CMU with a concrete slab foundation. The L-shaped building contained a garage space on the first floor that extended deep into the property and held five cars (including one owned by a celebrity), while the second and third floors were home to a single duplex apartment above the front portion of the garage.

Led by CEO Floris Keverling Buisman and with support from New York’s Empire State Development, the 475 team spent months transforming what was once a lump of clay into a new, two-story office space that is comfortable, healthy, and suffused with natural light. The new headquarters, which opened in early 2025, also embodies the principles of high-performance construction, as well as other best practices 475 recommends to clients. The result is an office that is:

• Low in embodied energy

• Built with natural materials

• Foam free

• Comfortable and healthy

No surprise, it also meets Passive House standards.

Passive House United

475.Supply was founded on the principles of Passive House construction, and these principles remain central to the company’s DNA. In fact, "475" in the company’s name refers to the heat demand requirement of 4.75 kBTU per square foot per year in the Passive House Institute’s criteria. When they purchased the property at 369 Warren Street, there was no doubt that their new headquarters would be retrofitted to meet Passive House standards.

But which standard would they choose—PHI’s EnerPHit program or Phius certification? While the two are based on the same core principles, these principles are applied in different ways that can significantly impact everything from the sizing of mechanical systems to the composition of building assemblies. Rather than seeing a fork in the road, the team worked with Passive House Consultant John Mitchell of bldgtyp and opted to pursue both paths at once. Once they receive final certification, the facility will be the first dual Passive House certified building in the world!

More than being a symbol of unity, the process of certifying through both standards allows the project to serve as a solution and a demonstration for customers and staff alike. Hopefully we see more like it!

Preserving Embodied Energy

Though the team planned to radically transform the building’s interior, they wanted to leave as much of the façade, masonry walls, concrete floor, and foundation in place as they could. Preserving these materials extends their life; keeps them out of the landfill; and avoids the need for additional energy to extract, process, and transport new materials.

They also made certain to fortify any of portion of the enclosure that had grown weaker with time. For example, helical piles made from steel were installed along to reinforce the foundation (while also reducing the need for additional concrete).

The team also decided that they wanted to keep the existing sliding door from their old office, so they very carefully loaded it onto a few dollies and wheeled it over to the new location. “Everything went really well until we got here and realized that it was too tall to get through the garage door,” Director of Finance Matt Cull explains.

“We had to take it off the dollies, and then we used my Egyptian roller method to get it into place.” According to Cull, the method used a few leftover dowels found around the construction site as rollers. As they moved the door into position, they took the dowel from the back and moved it to the front. Though primitive, it got the job done.

Using Natural Materials

Unfortunately, the roof could not be salvaged because it had fallen into serious disrepair and contained asbestos, so the team opted to replace it with mass timber components. They worked with general contractors City Line Interiors, architecture firm Ryan Enschede Studio, and structural engineers Murray Engineering to create a roof system that uses glulams spaced 12 feet on center, filled in with Douglas fir NLT. These glulams were sourced from Unalam, a manufacturer located just 170 miles away in New York’s Southern Tier.

Mass timber was chosen for its carbon sequestration properties, but it was left exposed as part of an effort to avoid high-carbon materials like sheetrock whenever possible and to highlight the natural beauty of the wood. Meanwhile, patterns in the double stairs, as well as the exposed ceilings, alternate between 2x6 and 2x4 beams. These patterns allude to the building’s address, 369, which incidentally happens to be a sequence that Nicola Tesla thought was key to understanding the secrets of the universe (readers can dive down that rabbit hole on their own time).

To prevent rainwater from staining, damaging, or warping the NLT framing, the team used Pro Clima ADHERO VISTO timber protection membranes as the air and vapor control layer, which was then topped with an average of 10 inches of ROCKWOOL Toprock® DD, followed by the final roofing membrane.

Foam Free Assemblies

The first floor of the building had long served as a garage and the exposed and uninsulated CMUs along the party walls made it look the part. While masonry retrofits have long been a cornerstone of 475’s expertise, the team saw the retrofit as a golden opportunity to test out a new product that combines the benefits of stone wool insulation with a smart vapor retarder, combining thermal, vapor, and air control layers into a single, easy-to-install solution.

The product, Smartrock®, was developed in partnership with ROCKWOOL and is designed to be installed directly on the interior of concrete and masonry walls. It includes a layer of ROCKWOOL’s high-performance Cavityrock insulation in addition to Pro Clima’s INTELLO PLUS membrane. The vapor-open insulation layer allows for inward drying while providing Class A fire rated insulation in accordance with IBC Section 703.3.1.

The team sealed the existing masonry walls with VISCONN, a liquid-applied air barrier, before installing the Smartrock boards. To ensure a continuous insulation layer devoid of thermal bridges, the Smartrock boards were anchored directly to the masonry using Trufast PMF anchors. Once installed, the seams were sealed with TESCON VANA tape. The insulation seamlessly connects with the walls and roof to create a completely thermal-bridge-free assembly.

The existing slab was sealed with a Stego vapor barrier and then outfitted with just 2.5 inches of high-compressive-strength mineral wool. The relative slimness of the insulation layer came as a relief during modeling, as it meant that the 475’s operations team would be able to seamlessly move pallets of materials through the front entrance without needing a ramp.

Once they were sealed in, Kevin Brennan of Brennan Brennan Insulation & Airtightness conducted a preliminary blower door test. The building achieved an impressive 0.35 ACH50 on the first attempt, though there is hope that the score will be even lower when they conduct their official blower door test.

Building Like the Future Depends on It

For more than a decade, the team at 475 has been both a supplier of high-performance building supplies and an advocate for more sustainable and efficient building practices. Their new, dual certified Passive House headquarters will serve as a showcase not only for sophisticated building techniques and high-performance materials, but also the ideals that they have long espoused. From their new base of operations at 369 Warren Street, 475 will be able to show future generations how to build like the future depends on it.

All photographs by Nicholas Venezia courtesy of Studio Nicholas Venezia. If you’d like to see 475’s new office for yourself, feel free to contact them through the 475.Supply site!