By Stephani L. Miller
Designing high-performance residences for custom clientele may yield extraordinary houses, but as the founders of ZeroEnergy Design in Charlestown, Mass., realized, such work impacts only a small percentage of houses in the overall marketplace. So the diverse ZeroEnergy Design team—comprised of designers, engineers, and businesspeople—founded FreeGreen and FreeGreen.com to make green home designs free for everyone, thereby encouraging progressive building practices among a wider audience.
Why free? According to the firm's research and estimates, nearly 50 percent of house plans are accessed through "black-market" means—as in, they're never paid for. FreeGreen figures that if home-plan users don't want to pay for plans and will find a way to use them without paying for them, they might as well get them for free in the first place.
The key to providing free downloadable house plans complete with construction documents, 3-D renderings, and product specifications is FreeGreen's strategy of selling product specification slots to product vendors; vendors pay to be speced into plans. "It's an interesting, trackable, and effective way to encourage people—especially in the sphere of green—to use a product," says CEO David Wax. Vendors consider FreeGreen's house plans, choose the ones that align with their brands, and buy those product spec slots, he says.
Wax acknowledges that some customers may question the trustworthiness of paid product specifications, but the firm offsets this money-making strategy for its free service by establishing transparency and by providing the performance details of the products specified. FreeGreen's method of specification is clearly stated on its Web site, and performance ratings from established, national, third-party green certification programs are listed for each product. Also, energy modeling reports for 270 locations across the country can be performed for each house plan.
FreeGreen currently offers only a few plans, but it will continue adding designs in a variety of architectural styles. The firm is also developing an open-source platform that will allow any architect to add high-performance house plans to the site by submitting design development-level documents and critical details.
"We want a meritocracy for design," says chief architectural officer Ben Uyeda. "There are so many young, talented architects out there, and it's a travesty that so few citizens get to work with an architect when they purchase or build a new home. My goal is to create a better link between the design talent and the consumers of design." Eventually, customers will be able to post design and product reviews on the site.
FreeGreen's team will render the design, perform energy modeling reports, post the plan to its site, create the architect's profile page, and manage the sale of specifications to vendors. Architects posting designs to FreeGreen will receive a sliding fee—a percentage of ad revenue—based on the number of house plan downloads and the number of vendors paying for specification in a plan. Since its launch early in 2008, 1,500 users have registered and 2,000 free house plans have been downloaded. Visit www.freegreen.com to peruse designs.
