Designing Sustainable Environments for Human Health and Wellbeing
Ken Wilson FAIA, FIIDA, FASID, LEED Fellow is an award-winning architect and interior designer with a passion for creating high-performance environments that prioritize sustainability, carbon reduction, and occupant health.
Case Study:
The Healthy Green House Project
The Healthy Green House Project is a fully electric, net-zero home that explores a question that feels increasingly relevant in the Mountain West: can a high-performance, all-electric home work in a cold, high-consumption ski-town context without costing more or compromising comfort?
The house is located in Park City, Utah and designed to generate all of its power on site. It was conceived as a built case study—aimed not just at producing all of its operational energy needs, but also at lowering embodied carbon and supporting long-term health and well-being through indoor air quality, thermal comfort, daylight, and material selection.
What made the exercise more interesting is that it was approached with a constraint: to deliver the house at roughly the same cost as a typical Park City home of similar size and quality. The goal was to test whether a lower-carbon, healthier approach could be accessible in a market where large, energy-intensive homes are common.
As both architect and client, I treated the project as an opportunity to rethink some long held assumptions about what residential design in a cold climate can be.
Shouldn't your indoor environment be the healthiest place it can be?
Imagine an air quality system that filters out wildfire smoke and removes pollen, mold spores, and bacteria.
Every material was selected to eliminate off-gassing of harmful chemicals.
Imagine continuously monitoring your air quality for harmful VOCs and odorless gases like radon that can seasonally fluctuate.
Sound insulation, circadian-tuned lighting, and automated blackout shades — designed around how you actually sleep.
This home produces as much energy as it uses over a calendar year — completely free, completely on-site.
Imagine living in a home that is carbon neutral.
Ken Wilson Architecture & Interior Design
About
Ken Wilson FAIA, FIIDA, FASID, LEED Fellow is an architect and interior designer whose career has focused on sustainable design and human wellbeing since 1999 when he led the design of the Greenpeace USA headquarters in Washington, DC. Since then, he has gone on to design headquarters projects for numerous other progressive thinking companies and organizations including the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID), the International Interior Design Association (IIDA), and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). His work has been published in seven countries outside the U.S. and his projects have received over 130 national and regional design awards. Ken is the only architect in the country to hold fellowships in the American Institute of Architects, the IIDA, the ASID, and LEED.
In the early 2000’s Ken served on the core committees that wrote the original Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating systems for Commercial Interiors and Core & Shell Buildings. He has received the ASID’s National Designer of Distinction Award and has been named Contract Magazine’s Designer of the Year. Ken has lectured nationally and internationally on design for sustainability and wellness, and has been the commencement speaker for the College of Architecture and Urban Studies at Virginia Tech.
With the Healthy Green House Project, Ken is now applying a career’s worth of knowledge and experience to single family residential design, focusing on the Mountain West.
If you are interested in energy independent, low embodied carbon home that maximizes the health and wellbeing of your family, drop me a line and let’s have a conversation.
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