Global Innovation Home of the Year Brings Wellness to Production Home Design

Wellness-focused home design is becoming increasingly common as home builders and owners focus on comfort and livability. But most wellness concepts in the residential space are offered at the very high end of the market in custom homes.

ERTH360, a home design and architecture firm based in Ontario, has spent years focused on bringing wellness concepts to production home design. Its collaboration with Empire Communities, a home builder based in Toronto, won the Gold award for GIA Global Innovation Home of Year at NAHB’s The Nationals for 2024.

ERTH360 and Empire built the ERTH360 Discovery Home as a proof-of-concept project in a large community under development where homes start around $600,000 on the outskirts of the greater Toronto area. The company used an existing home model with a few floor plan modifications as the base of the Discovery Home design, a 2,661-square-foot home with four bedrooms.

The ERTH360 Discovery Home standing completed in a development in Caledonia, Ontario.

The primary objective of the Discovery Home was to understand how the health, wellness and sustainability features in its design would impact a production home building strategy. Those key features included:

• The first production-built home in North America to meet the ASHRAE Standard 241 for indoor air quality.
• A circadian lighting system that delivers bright morning light and eliminates melatonin-suppressing blue light at night.
• Twelve calibrated air sensors inside the home, plus an outdoor sensor capable of detecting wildfires.
• Advanced air filtration systems.
• A high-performance building envelope, constructed off site.
• Passive building materials that help regulate humidity naturally.

The home was completed in 2024, and ERTH360 has already used some of the indoor air quality features of the Discovery Home to develop an ERTH360 Air package available in its production homes.

The Discovery Home continues to serve as a living lab, testing innovative materials, mechanical systems and construction techniques to advance future sustainable home building practices.

Andrew Guido, vice president of sustainability and innovation at ERTH360, said, “The market will determine how these designs are implemented in production building, but the feedback has been great and we’re going to continue to innovate.”