The backstory
We started designing and building Collective Homes in 2021. The effort came from a desire to offer clients a path towards building and living in a high performance home that avoided a lot of the pitfalls we saw with a custom design process – planning delays, budget miscommunications, and the overall cost of unique design choices. While one thing we’ve learned along the way is that every client does want some ability to customize, we also have taken a lot of the lessons learned building the first Collective Home designs in order to improve the process and – hopefully – deliver a more and more affordable product for our extraordinary clients. From the first home built in 2022 in Bozeman, MT to the many more that are to come, we greatly appreciate the opportunity to work with property owners, developers, and owner-builders in the pursuit of a better building.
A better home
Collective Homes are designed, planned, and built with Collective experience. They are the result of a marriage between the warmth of wood, the efficiency of a 21st century building system, and the recognition of the dynamic nature of the future. They are an evolving platform for the flexible lifestyles and responsible footprint of tomorrow’s families, designed to keep generations of occupants comfortable, healthy, active, and safe.
Collective Homes give clients choices where they want them, predictability where it matters, and the durability and quality of a custom home without the design fees and planning delays. This is not your grandparents’ modular home. Collective Homes offer a beautiful, vernacular form using a pre-fabricated structure built off-site by our carpenters and installed at your site by our carpenters, for people who value old-world craft, with a few modern improvements. Collective Homes exceed building code requirements, value the renewable energy captured and stored from the sun, are modestly-sized, provide filtered fresh air with heat recovery, and are designed to make maintenance easy and hassle free.
Collective Homes offer a hybrid, more attainable approach to achieving a better life in a better home than the approach required by a custom high performance home process, that which is largely unattainable for most homebuyers. They are designed for principled people who are engaged in the conversation about the nature of materials and how we build, and yet don’t believe that they need to reinvent the wheel. They incorporate knowledge learned building exclusively high performance custom homes to a simplified, optimized process for delivering a high performance home for a wider market. They are modest homes for modest people, who believe in a world where better comfort, health, and sustainability are more within reach for any who desire it.
Tailored to your needs
A Collective Home process offers a great leap forward in the effort to build high performance homes. By offering a design optimized for performance and prefabrication, we provide developers, owner-builders, and property owners with a solid starting point from which they can make minor modifications to adapt to local site, climate, and demographic needs. The prefabrication then takes framing, insulating, and airsealing tasks into a controlled environment which allows the building to be fabricated in matter of weeks for its eventual install in a matter of days. By offering design, logistics, window & door supply, and installation services, Collective Carpentry can follow through to assure the highest quality end result.
We recently re-launched our Collective Homes offering by updating our 3 most popular home designs – a 2-bedroom, 3-bedroom, and 4-bedroom, all with flexible utility and/or additional office spaces and a super-insulated high performance shell. Each of these homes is modeled to the Passive House Low Energy Building Standard and prioritizes the use of wood-based, low Material Carbon Emission (MCE) materials throughout – sustainability, environmental consciousness, and construction efficiency are at their core. Large south-facing windows, adequate shading from the high summer sun, thick walls, an airtight building enclosure, and fresh air heat recovery ventilation are just some of the ways these houses are designed to keep you and your family comfortable throughout the year with minimal heating and cooling required.
At Collective Carpentry we’re all about flexibility, which is why these designs give our clients the flexibility to make these homes unique. While customizations do come with costs, the choice is yours – take the specifications we’ve proposed or choose to customize the design for a different layout, different interior and exterior finishes, or the addition of a basement, exterior deck, carport, or anything else you would like.
Questions? Click the button below to get started.
