Who We Are

BrightBuilt Home is a line of homes, designed by the award-winning team at Kaplan Thompson Architects, which deliver high-performance, low-energy, and high-design at an affordable price.  In an effort to reach a demographic that might not otherwise have access to net-zero level performance in a new home, BrightBuilt Home employs various design, material, and construction strategies to reduce costs and construction times.  BrightBuilt Home offers a range of possibilities, from high-performance standard base models to fully-customized net-zero designs.  Prices for the standard models start between $135-$165 per square foot - making it awfully hard to argue against netting zero!

Attainability. That is what BrightBuilt Home strives for above all else.  What do we mean?  It’s simple: that the elusive but attainable affordable low-energy high-performance home is possible.  The truth is out there…

…Let us show you where.  BrightBuilt Home offers a line of architect-designed, high-performance homes that are priced to offer substantial savings off the lifetime cost of a typical home and can be delivered in less time.  Sustainable is now attainable.  This is the BrightBuilt Home mission.

Sustainability. Just as we strive to make as small an impact on our homeowners’ wallets as possible, we also aim to make as small an impact on the environment as we can. BrightBuilt Home is committed to designing and facilitating the construction of homes that are efficient, comfortable, healthy, and environmentally conscious. These Net Zero Energy homes are capable of producing as much energy as they consume annually. We carefully analyze each home site and utilize the advantages of natural day lighting, warmth from the sun and natural ventilation to help minimize your reliance on energy-sucking light fixtures and completely eliminate that fossil-fuel gobbling furnace. We use non-toxic finishes and adhesives, Energy Star appliances and water-saving fixtures in each home.

We are currently partnered with Keiser Homes of Maine, for modular coverage in the Northeastern New England region.  We are very happy with this partnership, and look forward to many fruitful years to come.  We are also currently looking to expand our modular operations into other regions - to include the mid-Atlantic, the midwest, and.... the rest of the country!  We will keep you posted on any new developments as new modular partnerships form. In the meantime, of course, you always have the option to bring a BrightBuilt Home to life with site-build construction...

KEISER HOMES

Keiser Homes, Maine’s leading modular homebuilder, has known for years how to produce cost-effective homes that balance the logistics of off-site construction with resource-saving efficiency. With their list of New England’s top modular building partners, they have produced LEED-quality homes for years, and were one of the first modular homebuilders to offer non-toxic, higher performance, dense-pack cellulose insulation. Together with Kaplan Thompson Architects, a system was developed that locates that elusive sweet spot where low energy and low cost both exist at the same time.

That’s easy! It’s the fact that  “Going green” can, effectively, be free!

Truly. By simplifying, formalizing, and centralizing the construction process, it is possible to bring the cost of a new high-performance, net-zero home within reach for a much larger population of potential homebuyers, and comparable in price to a mere code-built structure of similar size and scope.

Another excellent question and one of our favorites! Attainable green building is the great puzzle, and the solution for us has been careful cost offsetting. Striving to achieve the win-win-win-win of this scenario in every project is what gets our juices really flowing.

Essentially, the quality and integrity of the building envelope must be brought to the point where you no longer need a typical mechanical system. To pay for that increase, take out the cost of that no-longer-needed expensive beast in the mechanical room, completely eliminate those incessant maintenance needs, allow yourself to live and work in a building more comfortable than you’ve ever imagined, and get yourself off of climate destroying fossil fuels all at the same time.  Finding that sweet spot where cost and energy use are optimized is key and is something we love to share with our clients. We’d love to show you our spreadsheets sometime (if you think you might be able to stay awake!).

We’re advocates of setting project goals at the outset, regardless of what they are. Sometimes these programs are a great way of sharing responsibility with your builder (and architect) for achieving something that you believe in but don’t want to manage so closely yourself. Perhaps most importantly, however, enrolling in a certification program keeps a project from backsliding once things get moving. It’s far too easy to have your big goals nibbled away, to "suffer death by a thousand cuts" it’s sometimes called. Having a certification program lets everyone say “we can’t do that, we’ve got a goal to stick to!”

We have experience with a number of programs, including LEED (we’ve met this standard on many different projects to date), Passivhaus (we’re working on several now and Principal Jesse Thompson was the first Passivhaus certified architect north of Boston), Living Building Challenge (on BrightBuilt Barn), and Thousand-Home Challenge (on Nearmere Zero). We are also early adopters of the 2030 Challenge, whose goal is to achieve a dramatic reduction in the climate-change-causing greenhouse gas by requiring all buildings to become carbon neutral by the year 2030. We’d love to talk to you in more detail about which, if any program, is right for you and your project