2014 has been a very busy year for us at Hammer & Hand. Both our Portland and Seattle teams have worked on some amazing projects, including new homes, a variety of home remodeling projects, and commercial tenant improvements. But that’s not all! Here’s just a few of our highlights for 2014:
1. H&H received recognition for multiple projects this year.
We were honored with multiple awards in 2014 for a few of our high performance building projects:
- “Custom Builder of the Year” – Earth Advantage’s 2014 Green Home Builder Awards (read more about it here).
- “Best Building Science” for Karuna House – Green Builder Magazine’s 2014 Green Home of the Year Awards
- “Best Mainstream Green” for Pumpkin Ridge Passive House – Green Builder Magazine’s 2014 Green Home of the Year Awards
- Outstanding Remodeling Achievement, “Commercial Interior” for our high performance build-out of Xico – Oregon Remodeler’s Association
- Outstanding Remodeling Achievement, “Commercial Specialty” for our Passive House retrofit of Glasswood’s second floor – Oregon Remodeler’s Association
2. Our woodshop crafted unique custom pieces for clients near and far.
In 2014 our woodshop displayed their expert craftsmanship by building a variety of custom pieces in different styles for clients both in Portland and across the US. A few of these pieces include a live edge dining table and bench, a custom Passive House door for a client in Chicago, a plans table for our Seattle office, and tables crafted from reclaimed picklewood.
3. We released our construction Best Practices Manual online.
This year we were excited to make public our Best Practices Manual, a guidebook of field-tested construction details, many shaped by our high performance building and Passive House building experience. It’s a resource referenced daily by our carpenters and we are happy to be able to make it available to anyone who wishes to utilize it as we have. We continue to refine and add to it and plan to release new editions in the future.
4. We completed our Bullitt Center tenant improvement and settled into our new Seattle digs.
After a temporary stay on the Bullitt Center’s fourth floor shared workspace we were excited to move into our own space. Our build-out of the office included dropped ceilings in the entry and conference room, gray Echo Eliminator panels for sound absorption, a photo gallery wall, and a custom conference room door. We spent 2014 making ourselves at home in the new space, adding artwork to the walls and our own custom FSC-certified desks. We’ve enjoyed working in this noted Living Building and look forward to another year here.
5. We added Forest Stewardship Council® Certified furniture and millwork to our offerings.
This year we were proud to add FSC®-certified millwork to our portfolio. While we’ve been building with salvaged and sustainably sourced wood for years, we are now able to create and sell FSC-certified products in our shop. This green seal of approval is just the latest addition to our sustainable construction certifications and helps to drive forward our green building practices.
6. We broke Ground on Madrona Passive House in Seattle.
One of the new projects we started this year that we’re really excited about is Madrona Passive House. Designed by SHED Architecture & Design, the house perches on a hillside with views of Lake Washington and the Cascade Mountains. A structural slab supported by 26 piles drilled deep into the hillside “floats” the house above marginal soils on a “platform-on-stilts”. The project is well under way and will be completed in July. We’re also excited about some new Passive House projects in the works, including a new Passive House in Wallingford (Seattle) and one in Issaquah.
7. Two of our projects, Karuna House and Pumpkin Ridge Passive House, earned Zero Energy Ready Home certifications.
The US Department of Energy granted Karuna House and Pumpkin Ridge its highest level of green home certification – “Zero Energy Ready Home.”
“A DOE Zero Energy Ready Home is a high performance home which is so energy efficient that a renewable energy system can offset all or most of its annual energy consumption. Only a select group of the top builders in the country meet the extraordinary levels of excellence and quality specified by the US Department of Energy guidelines.”
– US Department of Energy
Read more about this certification here.
8. We transformed an old service station into a fun Peruvian chicken eatery.
The most transformative commercial project we worked on in 2014 was Big Chickie. The building was originally Rudy Hansen’s Service Station, a business with deep roots in Seattle’s Hillman City neighborhood. The owners of the building wanted to maintain the original structure to honor their father Rudy’s legacy while revitalizing the parcel and bringing new business to the neighborhood. We worked with Architecture Building Culture to turn the service station into a family restaurant. Read more about this project here.
9. We increased our Passive House and high performance building consulting work.
In addition to building Passive House projects in Seattle and Portland, we have also acted as consultants on a variety of Passive House and other high performance building projects across the United States. H&H Passive House consultants Dan Whitmore and Skylar Swinford have consulted on scores of projects across the entire 48 from Washington to California, Georgia to Maine, and many places in between. Many of these closer to our home turf – such as Sauvie Island, OR and Walla Walla, WA.
Palatine Passive House designed by Malboeuf Bowie Architecture with consulting by H&H.
10. Launch of perFORM 2014 & 2015 Building Design Competitions
In 2014 we hosted our inaugural perFORM building competition. The competition challenged emerging architecture professionals to fuse high design with high performance building in the design of a single-family house in Seattle that achieves Passive House-like levels of energy performance (check out the winners here). perFORM 2015 calls for architectural students and interns to design a net zero energy, mixed-use, multifamily building in the heart of Portland, OR.
It was a great year and we can’t wait to see what 2015 has in store for us!
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