Key takeaways

When you have a solution for an industry, live and breathe it yourself as the business owner. The Toa Homes GM is living in the showhome of Toa Homes with his family.

If you create a product for an industry it should be easily used. Toa Homes panels have been made in a low tech way which helps with cost and requires little training.

Businesses are often launched on the back of firmly held personal beliefs and a mission to solve a problem.

For Toa Homes General Manager James Bushell and his partners, they believe that the state of housing in Aotearoa New Zealand is woeful, even under Healthy Homes standards.

Toa Homes, a joint venture between Ngāti Toa Rangatira and How We Live Investments, have come up with a simple panel system where planks are fitted together to form rooms and whole homes.

“The way we do the panels, they are like Lego, so you have 16 Lego pieces that can connect in infinite ways,” says James, a shareholder of How We Live Investments.

“The team looked for simple tech for its solution, and it’s taken over three years of R & D with specialists to come up with something that is “unbelievably simple” and looks like you could bang it up every time,” he says.

“If we came up with an engineered solution it wouldn’t be accessible to the industry, it would involve more training, more upskilling and would meet resistance by tradies,” he explains.

The Toa Homes are made of recycled timber and aligned with Passivhaus principles with cooling and heating dashboard technology to keep the home warm, dry and quiet.

Living the Toa Homes lifestyle

For the Toa Homes GM, building healthy homes is personal. The Wellingtonian who has a background in strategy development, implementation and governance, has a young daughter with his partner and he wants her to grow up in a healthy home.

“That’s what we want. I have a one year old and it’s really important, they are vulnerable,” he says.

James and family are living in the Toa Home show home in Porirua on 12 hectares of bush and invite visitors out there regularly.

“We have got our own garden, water comes from the roof, we have solar panels so we are not reliant on the grid for energy. We want to make sure we are as self-resilient as possible,” he says.

The main impetus for the Toa Homes initiative

For the Toa Homes partners the driver for the business is around keeping families healthy and providing a home for the same price as standard built homes but infinitely better.

“We are spending huge amounts on healthcare and building the cheapest homes. We can reduce health costs by having healthy homes,” says the Toa Homes GM, who estimates there would be a 45% reduction in health care costs for a family if they lived in a Toa Homes dwelling.

“Our aspiration is for affordable, warm, dry, healthy, energy efficient, passive or near-passive homes built by Toa Homes to become the norm across Aotearoa - beginning in the Porirua and Wellington region,” says Helmut Modlik, Chief Executive of Te Rūnanga o Toa Rangatira.

“Whether we build the homes ourselves or just supply the passive panels to others to assemble and complete for homes, we don’t care. We just want the outcome for whānau,” he says.

Who Toa Homes want to work with

A Toa Home can be built anywhere in the country, says James, who works with a team of five, and has a group of advisors to call on who have expertise in Passivhaus, sustainability, architecture and engineering.

Toa Homes’ ambition is to work with developers and community housing providers on a scale which gets more people into this housing, says James.

Toa Homes panels could equally work for dense three or four storey housing and a stand alone home out in the bush, he adds.

Architects are loving the Toa Homes concept, he says.

“A lot of architects are coming back to us with designs from clients. They’ll say, ‘We’ve come in at this price, can you do a redesign at a price that works for them’.”

The Toa Homes team is pleased with where it’s got to on price.

“One of my friends did a passive house at $10,000 a sq m - we are sub $4000 a sq m,” says James.

“We are really proud of the price, it’s similar to a standard build with a NZ building code minimum. Some elements, like the windows are more expensive, the Mechanical Ventilation and Heat Recovery (MHVR) system, some things cost more,” he says.

For the full article on Stuff read here.

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