A net‐zero home can sound abstract until you try to imagine it inside your own walls. What does“ reducing your carbon footprint” really look like beyond recycling, composting, and remembering the canvas bags at the grocery store? For those net-zero curious, it simply means a house that makes as much energy as it uses over the course of a year.
For East Branch Studio founder Kent Hicks— also an adjunct professor in UMass Amherst’ s Building and Construction Technology Program and co-founder of the university’ s Design Build Program— the work at East Branch is an extension of his teaching on bio-based, low-carbon materials, all aimed at nudging the built environment toward climate-positive design. In other words, buildings that, over their lives, do more good than harm.
For Hicks and East Branch co‐CEO and building designer Emily Duffy, the answer starts long before the solar panels go on the roof. It starts in the way a New England house is sited, insulated, and sealed so tightly, and then ventilated so carefully, that it can quietly make the home’ s needed energy while still feeling like a healthy, comfortable, deeply familiar home with a kind of“ invisible infrastructure.”
For the full net‐zero impact on new construction, Hicks and Duffy begin with careful design and site evaluation that reduce the home’ s energy demand before any equipment is added. Next is the consideration of a high‐performance envelope( optimized insulation and airtightness in the layers between indoors and outdoors) that does most of the heating and cooling work passively. Then, thoughtful mechanicals and renewables( ventilation, solar, and possibly bio‐based materials) are included that fine‐tune comfort and close the net‐zero gap.
They also contemplate human‐centered outcomes: The house remains affordable, comfortable, healthy, historically sensitive, and“ normal” to live in, even though it is doing sophisticated energy work in the background.
THREE DECADES TO NET ZERO
In the late 1980s, long before“ net-zero home” was a recognizable term let alone a trend, Hicks was quietly stress‐testing a question most New England builders weren’ t asking yet: How far could you push energy efficiency and performance and still have a house that feels deeply comfortable and livable?
The experiments were literal: south‐facing expanses of glass that used the sun’ s heat directly through windows. There were at least a few January days when a bright sky overheated the house. Those early trials pushed the firm past one‐off moves and into thinking about the house as a single, tuned system: thicker insulation, tighter envelopes, and intentional mechanical ventilation, all long before“ high performance” was a marketing term.
By the early 1990s, East Branch Studio was already delivering highly efficient homes. When solar panels became more accessible and affordable, moving into net‐zero territory felt less like a reinvention than the next logical step.“ The through line of our work is continuously learning, sharing what we’ ve learned, and assisting with efforts in moving toward a climate‐positive built environment,” Hicks says.
That decades‐long evolution shows up as feeling, not jargon, for East Branch homeowners like Jane Bronson, whose Great Barrington home was completed in 2022.“ There’ s just something delightfully unencumbered about it,” she says of her home.“ It’ s so simple, but there’ s something about it; a feeling of ease that I can’ t quite name.”
To honor the specific views Bronson cared about most on her property, Hicks and Duffy chose an orientation and window layout that tilted the balance slightly away from perfect energy math and toward the lived experience of the site.
Once the structure and envelope were in place, they added renewables as a small system adapted to the original build. Footthick walls and windows with three layers of glass for extra insulation still crack open for fresh air from spring to fall. As for winter, Bronson says,“ you can get right
Above, East Branch models contain 12 " dense back cellulose walls R40, triple pane windows and 24 " of loose fill cellulose R-72. R-value is an indication of a materials insulating power, higher R-value means better insulation.
Opposite, A striking entrance of a home in Great Barrington designed by East Branch.
Spring 2026 BERKSHIRE MAGAZINE // 59