A Passive House as Proof of Concept: Wayne Turett’s Greenport Living Laboratory - GreenBuildingAdvisor

Green Building Blog A Passive House as Proof of Concept: Wayne Turett’s Greenport Living Laboratory An architect sets out to build his personal home as a hands-on experiment in Passive House performance By Murrye Bernard | March 27, 2026 The Turett House. Image: Liz Glasgow More Green Building Blog Natural Ventilation at Scale: What a 2,000-Bed Student Housing Project Can Teach Residential Designers The Cape Cod Hemp House: Pioneering Spray-Applied Hemplime on the Coast How EcoFlats Achieves Phius Zero at Market Rates: Systems and Strategies Cost-Effective Passive House for Multifamily: Lessons from EcoFlats at Log City Wayne Turett, founder of The Turett Collaborative in New York City and a former United Nations sustainability speaker, has spent much of his career weaving environmental responsibility into his work. But when it came to his own house, he wanted to move beyond theory and see what was possible in practice.So he designed and built his own Passive House as a full-scale experiment.“I’ve described this house as a living laboratory,” says Turett, who also served as the construction manager for the project, with Vector East as the main subcontractor. “I wanted to see how effective it really was in terms of energy efficiency, and to monitor it every month to see, year after year, month after month, what the kilowatt usage actually looked like.”The result is a two-story, 2,445-square-foot home in the historic coastal village of Greenport, located at the eastern tip o...