H1 is the New Zealand Building Code’s energy efficiency clause — it sets minimum insulation values for new walls, roofs, floors, and windows. The 2023 update significantly tightened those minimums, but they’re still a floor, not a ceiling.

A “high-performance home” exceeds those minimums — usually with higher R-values, lower-U-value glazing, deliberate airtightness, and planned ventilation. There’s no single standard for “high-performance” — it’s a relative term that means “noticeably better than bare code”. Certifications like Homestar and Passive House are attempts to standardise what “better” means in practice.

Probably not. Both certifications add design rigour and provide third-party assurance, which has value — but they also add design cost, modelling cost, certification cost, and often construction cost.

For most owner-occupied homes, a well-designed above-code home will deliver 80–90% of the performance benefit at 30–50% of the certification overhead. Passive House is genuinely worth pursuing if you want the highest comfort performance available and you’re prepared to pay for it. Homestar is worth pursuing if you specifically need the certification (resale signal, lender requirement, council incentive). Otherwise, design the home to perform — skip the badge.

It depends on how far above H1 you go. Modest upgrades — better insulation specs, deliberately positioned windows, basic ventilation — add a small percentage to the build cost and are often offset within ten to fifteen years on energy bills alone. Going further — Passive House standard, full mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, triple glazing — adds substantially more.

The honest answer is: don’t think about it as a percentage. Think about it as the cost of specific upgrades, each of which has its own payback. We map those out at the feasibility stage so you can decide which ones make sense for your project.

Both — though retrofits are more complicated. The cheapest retrofit performance gains come during a recladding, when the walls are open anyway. Insulation upgrades, airtightness improvements, and window replacements are most cost-effective when they’re done as part of work already happening.

Performance retrofits done in isolation — pulling cladding off solely to add insulation — rarely pay back on energy bills alone. They make sense when they’re combined with renovation or recladding work, or when comfort is the primary driver.

Passive design uses the building itself — orientation, layout, windows, shading, thermal mass — to do the heating, cooling, and lighting work that mechanical systems would otherwise have to do.

In Auckland practice, that means: living spaces facing north for winter solar gain, eaves and shading sized to block summer sun while admitting winter sun, cross-ventilation paths designed in for natural cooling, thermal mass (concrete floor, masonry walls) placed where the sun reaches it. None of this costs more than ignoring it — but ignoring it costs a lot in heating bills and discomfort.

We do the architectural design, consent documentation, and council liaison. The build is handled by a builder you select — usually through a tender we run on your behalf. For new builds we work with Superior Homes; for retrofits we work with Superior Renovations.

For performance work specifically, the builder matters more than usual. Performance specs need to be delivered on site — airtightness detailing, insulation continuity, window installation — and not every builder takes that work seriously. We pick partners who do.

No — our work is Auckland-only. The reason is honest: planning rules, council processes, and climate vary enough between regions that being deeply familiar with Auckland’s is what we trade on. We’d rather do that one thing well than spread thin.