SS4 Flora Vista Passive House

517 Flora Vista Rd NE,

Olympia, WA 98506

OPEN SATURDAY MAY 4TH

11:00 AM – 5:00 PM

Flora-Vista-Passive-House_Bicycle-Homebu

Site Description

FEATURES: Energy Efficiency, Solar Power, Design Innovation, High Indoor Air Quality, Advanced Building Envelope

CERTIFICATIONS: Passive House, Net Zero Energy, Energy Star

Are you interested in sustainable building and sustainable design?

You’re on the Northwest Green Home Tour! If you weren't interested before, you will be soon.

This Green Tour – visit a home that combines construction craftsmanship and data-driven building science as a path to sustainability and health.

Visit a certified Passive House and Net-Zero home.

Built by Olympia home crafting legend, Bicycle Homebuilding, and designed by local and international award winning sustainable architecture studio, Artisans Group, Flora Vista Passive House is a must-visit stop on the 2019 Northwest Green Home Tour.

Beautiful View – Healthy Home

Imagine a home designed and built for the whole picture of your health.

A healthy home for our planet and a healthy home for the people who live in it.

The extreme energy efficiency of Flora Vista Passive House means a much lower long term carbon impact. This home is so efficient that body heat and your teapot are actually accounted for in your heating system. It is so efficient that even a modest solar array quickly makes it net-positive. Instead of being an energy drain, this home is a boon.

Passive House also means that indoor air quality is built into the home’s being. With an integrated whole-home ventilation system there’s fresh filtered air and consistent temperatures throughout (even in corners – even next to windows).

And what does this home’s high indoor air quality mean to you? Do you have allergies? Is there asthma in your family? Indoor air – it seems obvious, but it’s overlooked – it’s the very air you and your family breath – and Flora Vista Passive House has high indoor air quality designed and built right into its core.

So yeah, by all means, come check out the beautiful view of our beautiful Pacific Northwest, but you’ll end up wanting to stay because a Passive House – is a whole kind of healthy, and you can feel it.

So…Passive House…Obviously Cool, But Anything Else?

Yes. We’re glad you asked.

ADU, Aging In Place & Multi-Generational Home

Flora Vista Passive House is like a Swiss Army Home of interesting and awesome home stuff.

Not only is it sustainable, it also has an ADA accessible ADU.

Designed to gracefully support aging-in-place living, the ADU also works to support a multi-generational home design that embraces connectedness and provides privacy.

Interesting Notes About Flora Vista Passive House

Operates at 75% less energy used than a home built to today’s energy efficient standards.
10.2 kWh grid tied solar array from South Sound Solar
Ductless Heat Pump from Alpine Ductless
Zehnder heat recovery ventilator
Sanden CO2 Heat Pump Water Heater (both the Sanden & Zehnder came through local sustainable superstore Small Planet Supply).
Rooms are finished with bamboo and cork flooring.
Low and No VOC paints and finishes.
Cabinets are by Beech Tree Woodworks and are FSC certified
All appliances are Energy Star rated.
Quadruple pane windows from Alpen Windows.

Notes From Bicycle Homebuilding’s Pete Chramiec

Holy crap – it works!

We barely used our small heater all winter (it’s an apartment-sized ductless heat pump). On the coldest days we’d turn it on for dinner time and leave it on for about an hour. The house stayed comfortable all night and up until dinner the next day.

Our construction strategy benefitted from all the brave and experimental Passive House builders before us. Thanks to all the lessons they shared and being able to learn from their experiences we were able to create a simple, repeatable, and teachable Passive House system for the Pacific Northwest. It made the air sealing strategy pretty foolproof (our final blower door was .36 ach50).

And a huge shout-out to Dan Whitmore and Skylar Swinford for their experience with the PHPP and general wizardry. By waiting so long to build my first certified PH, they made it pretty easy.