Project Highlight: A custom home in Arvada, Colorado
When one family in Arvada, Colorado set out to build their own home, the goal was ambitious from the start: 5,300 square feet, all on one level, designed around the needs of a son who uses a wheelchair, and efficient enough to run almost entirely on sunlight. It’s a rare combination of goals, but the finished home manages all three, and it offers a good reminder that accessibility, comfort, and energy performance don’t have to compete.
Designed Around the People Who Live There
The floor plan reflects the family’s daily life. Doorways and hallways are wider than standard to accommodate a wheelchair, and every exterior door has a low threshold. The son’s suite has its own standalone conditioning separate from the rest of the house, so his space can be tuned to his specific comfort needs. The great room, where the family spends most of its time, takes up roughly a third of the home’s footprint. None of these choices were an afterthought. They shaped the plan from day one.
Chasing the Sun
The home sits on a lot with excellent southern exposure, and the design leans into it. R-60 insulation in the ceilings and R-30 walls, built with 2-inch foam-backed Zip System sheathing, keep the building envelope well insulated and tight. Ten clerestory windows and four large south-facing windows bring in daylight and heat. On clear winter days, once outdoor temperatures climb above 25 degrees, the sun alone can carry the heating load. Finding windows that could keep pace with that kind of performance took some research and the homeowner landed on Alpen’s Tyrol line, and worked through the specifications and finishes with AE Building Systems.
Mechanical Systems Built to Match
A high-performance envelope only pays off if the mechanical systems are sized to match it. Two 48,000 BTU Arctic air-to-water heat pumps handle heating, cooling, and domestic hot water, one feeding the radiant concrete floors and the other supplying four fan coils for cooling, with three-way valves letting the systems support each other as demand shifts. The design team worked to size and fine-tune the equipment for the son’s suite, which carries different thermal and comfort requirements than the rest of the house. Fresh air comes from two CERV2 ventilation units, each with built-in air quality monitoring for VOCs and CO2, plus a UV light for added protection against bacteria and viruses.
Resilience Tested
Thirty-nine rooftop solar panels and four Tesla Powerwalls round out the picture, giving the home a buffer against the grid outages that have become more frequent in the area. During one recent outage, the house lost just a single degree of indoor temperature while neighboring homes dropped 10 to 15 degrees. That’s the tight envelope, energy storage, and thoughtful mechanical design doing their job quietly, exactly when it matters most.
A Home That Works on Every Level
A year into living there, the family reports the house performing at a high level of comfort and efficiency alike. It’s a strong example of what’s possible when accessibility, passive solar design, and high-performance building science are treated as one project instead of three. If you’re planning a home that needs to work as hard for your family as it does for the planet, AE Building Systems can help you think through the details, from window selection to whole-home performance.
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