One of our favorite Barndominium projects, "Blue Ridge Bliss" was featured in the the Spring 2026 edition of Equestrian Living. 

What an experience we’ve had following along with the progress of architect Kyle Barber’s journey building a fully certified passive house. Check out our previous blogs here: Part one, Part two, and Part three.

Kyle’s home recently passed the rigorous Phius (Passive House Institute) sanctioned blower door test; a certified diagnostic test designed to measure a structures airtightness while ensuring that it meets Phius’s stringent energy-efficiency standards. The test is done both during the construction process and again post-construction.

Following this milestone, the Barber’s hosted a Phius Alliance New York tour of their in-progress home, giving attendees a firsthand look at building a high-performance passive house from the owner’s perspective. Town officials, Phius verifiers, members and a team of Kyle’s co-workers gathered to share information, learn about the tenets of passive house construction and share in the joy of collaboration.

In the midst of all of this positive progress we caught up with Kyle to get an update on where he is and what comes next in his home building process. “There are a bunch of checklists and co-requisites as part of passive house that we have to meet. It's Energy Star, EPA WaterSense, EPA Indoor Air Plus, and DOE Energy Star Zero Ready Home and we just got our design certification. Which means they have reviewed our design and determined that we designed it to meet passive house.”

“We grew up in Colorado, and we were always impressed with the different timber frame homes that we would see in trade magazines, and we fell in love with them. We thought that if we ever had the chance, we would build ourselves a timber frame home. As we got closer to retirement, I started to look for a company that we could partner with to turn our goals into a reality.”

After securing a plot of land in Sisters, Oregon our clients began to tailor the property to accommodate their legacy retreat. 

“When we started the collaboration with New Energy Works, I knew it was a very good partnership because their design process allowed us to view our model in 3D and then collaborate with architect David Shirley."

Shirley appropriated the client’s vision and transformed their sketches into a structural reality where form and function work together.

There were some challenges that our team faced as we neared the finalization of the design including flipping the orientation of the house as the original positioning just wasn't going to work. 

“The biggest changes that David made had to do with the timber structure itself. Originally, drawn with post trusses David scrapped that idea and came up with what you see in the pictures, which is a lot more elegant and contains a little more character. Similar to the exterior, we went with the four-post design instead of a single post. David was able bring some magic to it and make it a little more than just the ordinary.”

The homeowners desire to be an active part of their home’s construction from the groundbreaking to the raising informed the collaborative nature of the project. To this end, they made the decision to act as the general contractor to ensure that the build was exactly what they envisioned.