KB Home ProjeKt® – KB Home, Builder, and A Dream Team of Partners to Develop Healthy Home of the Future
Builder Online
May 14, 2018
Innovation, like time, won’t wait.
Innovation’s cadence, trajectory, and velocity get their pace, purpose, and direction from two forces whose flow and energy are forever and always propulsive: One force is what people need as those needs evolve. The other is what they may not recognize yet that they need. But they will.
To keep step with change and compete in housing, builders have to channel both forces– staying on top of what home buyers need, and helping them to understand what those home buyers can expect next from innovators, who’ll allow them to get more value from their houses and communities than ever in the history of home.
So, we’re especially energized to reveal news of a proud new partnership for our 2019 BUILDER Concept home with KB Home–whose goal is—as it has long been—to continually reinvent and reset what average home buyers expect. In this case, team KB stretches to a new uncharted level, by both meeting their needs for healthy, attainable, high-performance, and smart homes, and exploring how to give them what they may not know they need.
“In 2010, we worked with BUILDER to develop the very first high-volume production version of a net zero energy house in Windermere, Fla. [near Orlando] the The KB Home GreenHouse: An Idea Home Created With Martha Stewart, and unveiled it in January 2011,” says Jeffrey Mezger, chairman, ceo and president of KB Home. “Now, the innovation that we designed and engineered into that home almost nine years ago has become widely practiced, and is on its way to becoming an industry standard. We have to keep collaborating with partners and push to continue making the future for how our buyers want to live in their homes. That brings us now to our next new horizon, health and well-being, which is where homes are going to need to go.”
The venture is now under development, and scheduled to be revealed to the public and builder audiences in January of 2019 in the Las Vegas-area master planned community of Inspirada, in Henderson, Nev. It will be called KB Home Projekt: Where tomorrow lives, befitting its fusion of entirely new-to-the-US-market features and functionality in smart technology, health measuring and monitoring, optimized energy and water use performance, as well as efficient factory-based building technology that will enable the project to scale for KB’s first-time and first-time move up average buyers in the Las Vegas market.
KB Home’s Las Vegas division, under division president Brian Kunec, and its corporate technology, sustainability, and purchasing teams led by corporate VP and CPO Dan Bridleman, Hanley Wood’s BUILDER, architecture firm KTGY, and landscape architects AndersonBaron, integrated offsite moonshot Entekra, built-space Well Building Standard pioneer Delos Labs, and the National Renewable Energy Labs have already been at work in the development and construction documentation of a home engineered to explore the future of residential architecture, engineering, and building. A host of manufacturers have engaged in the early-going as well, seeking ways not only to push the envelope on their own product development, but to find out how to advance interoperability and integration in both the building enclosure and the software systems
KB Home Projekt: Where tomorrow lives, is research and development on steroids, pulling together a dream team of experts, first to imagine, and then to design, engineer, and build a home whose structure and systems deliver real-time responsiveness, nimbleness and adaptability, energy and water use conservation, and health and well-being features, functionality, and measures.
The Projekt actually got its start as a showcase of sustainability and nimble, responsive living on the show floor of the Greenbuild International Show, in Los Angeles in the fall of 2016. Designed by KTGY and fabricated offsite, here was the idea:
[KB and its partners] set out to create an idea home that aims to tap into the applied brilliance, the fervor, and the vision of sustainability’s ground breakers, even as it marks a line in the sand about where and how one of the nation’s largest home building organizations can stretch its development and construction processes forward into a more energy-efficient, water-conserving, healthier, more nimble, more connected, and more mindful future.
That was our original model, and now comes time for Projekt to come to the real world on the ground at Inspirada.
“We look at these investments and collaborative partnerships as a laboratory to develop ways to create more value for our new homeowners,” says KB chairman and ceo Jeff Mezger. “Our entire organization will be looking at the innovation that we design into this Projekt and we’ll very likely be populating many of our homes with the innovations soon after that. This is all about how we learn to keep giving KB homeowners what they need.
And what they don’t know they need.
Here’s a few more details on the Projekt from a news release that will go out within the next day or so:
Hanley Wood, the premier information, media, event, and strategic marketing services company serving the residential, design and commercial construction industries, is again teaming up with KB Home, one of the largest homebuilders in the United States, to produce the KB Home ProjeKt: Where Tomorrow Lives. The project will represent the ultimate exploration of health, wellness and sustainability in a volume homebuilding framework. The best-in-class home will be revealed January 2019 in Las Vegas.
“The BUILDER Concept Home derives value from exploring a topic to reveal both the issues and challenges, and the solution,” says Peter Goldstone, CEO of Hanley Wood. “Only through the expertise of the builder and the collaboration of the partners can we create a platform that informs the industry on such a critical topic. In this case, the KB Home ProjeKt offers a look at the future of healthier living through design and building science, and, more importantly, how to make it practical for the average homebuyer.”
As a leader in sustainable homebuilding, KB Home will be leveraging its previous ProjeKt home experience to create a residence that incorporates new research and thinking from a variety of collaborators, including KTGY Architects, AndersonBaron, Delos Labs, the National Renewable Energy Labs and a number of supplier partners. A core objective of the new KB Home ProjeKt is to inform the public of the important daily health and wellness issues that can be addressed and/or improved within the home environment. At the same time, the KB Home ProjeKt will bring new insight to the professional building community on how to design, engineer and construct an attainable and cost-effective healthy home.
“We know the best way to predict the future is to build it,” said Jeffrey Mezger, KB Home’s chairman, president, and CEO. “Our practice is to anticipate today what our homeowners will want and need in the future and to find the most efficient and sustainable way to bring those ideas into reality. In the ProjeKt home, we will explore materials, processes and systems that will influence homebuilding in the future. Our goal is to build higher performance homes that also promote sustainable and healthier living, and provide flexible home designs that can adapt to homeowners’ changing needs.”
The new KB Home ProjeKt will also spotlight key health and wellness matters, such as the quality of air and water, circadian lighting, noise reduction, resilient technologies, and sound sleep support. These will be addressed through a close collaboration of the several partners that will bring the KB Home ProjeKt to life.
Current sponsors of the new KB Home ProjeKt include AeroBarrier, Allura Fiber Cement Products, Carrier, Cox, Eldorado Stone, Emser Tile, Greyter, Kingspan, Kohler, Kwikset, MiTek, Ply Gem Windows, Rainbird, SeaGull Lighting, Shaw, Sherwin Williams Company, Square D by Schneider Electric, Timberlake Cabinets, Uponor/Phyn, Western Windows Systems, Weyerhaeuser, and ZIP Systems® Sheathing & Tape.
Stay tuned for more news of this Projekt to come, because innovation’s not waiting.
