#24 WELL Built Homes For Our Senses feat. Ian MacFayden (Hummingbird Hill Homes)

Build Our Future Podcast

The health of our bodies and the environment depends on us changing the way we build and standards like Passive House, WELL, and LEED are at the forefront of this shift. Ian MacFayden joins us today to speak about how he is incorporating wellness standards like these into the residential side of construction. Ian is a carpenter and certified Passive House builder from HummingbirdHill Homes, a construction firm with a process designed to reconnect us with nature and maximize all of the human senses. Our exchange with Ian today is all about building standards that prioritize sustainability and wellness as well as how HummingbirdHill Homes achieves their health and efficiency goals in their builds. Ian takes us through some of the practicalities of optimizing the thermal comfort, air quality, and acoustical privacy of a living space, and also talks about a retrofit he is busy with whose goal is to set an example of how health-friendly a house can be with good planning and zero spray foam use. We also talk about the challenges of shifting mentalities in the construction industry that center around difficulties quantifying the health benefits of these types of houses. The last part of our discussion is devoted to some of the newest technical innovations that prioritize adaptive reuse and the possibilities they offer to a new form of construction that is friendly to the environment, our health, and our wallets too!