Thinking Different: Our New Passive House

Charter's New Smart Building Headquarters

When we decided to embark on the journey of designing a new Headquarters (HQ) for Charter, we wanted to transform our values into a tangible form embodied through our new HQ.


To achieve this, we broke it down into three main goals.

  • Value to our clients. To encapsulate our value we provide to our clients we will be showcasing our innovation by creating a “smart” building that utilizes our ingenuity along with technologies we represent to physically display the value that we bring to our clients daily. Values such as, more effective communication, better space utilization, and increased efficiencies to the overall business. Please look for our upcoming blog post where we will be detailing the smart abilities of our building.
  • More creative, happy, healthy staff.
  • Environmentally sustainable and responsible. The most difficult goal we had was to create a space that is responsible environmentally and sustainably and can be an example of our Forward Together strategy from a community perspective.

With our Architects and General Contractor, we landed on building our new HQ to be Passive House Certified. On educating ourselves to this standard, we realized that this would allow us to check all the boxes we had hoped to from a “physical building” perspective. If this is a standard you are not familiar with, you are most likely not alone. To understand why this design and certification is important to our environment, our sustainability and our future we have provided a link to where you can start your educational journey here.


Creative, Happy, Healthy Staff:

One of the core design features of our new building is simple, a high level of temperature comfort.

Our building is free from:

  • Draughts
  • Cold Spots
  • Excessive Over Heating

Our internal temperature will barely vary even through extreme cold and hot weather and will have a constant supply of fresh air. Within our building’s layout we have made sure to account for the happiness of our staff, whether it be our rooftop patio, our putting green, or open social stairwell; we’ve tried to incorporate areas of gathering and relaxation to provide our staff with moments of enjoyment in the hectic work week. We also plan to utilize our penthouse social floor to push our work hard, play hard values. Finally, we know how important Charter’s environmental footprint is for our forward-thinking staff and we are prideful that they will know their workplace values sustainability and has invested heavily in our environmental future.


Environmentally and Sustainably Responsible:

Passive House buildings are designed to be highly energy efficient.

We expect our building to utilize up to 90% less energy than a building of similar size constructed in a traditional fashion while performing the same if not better functions as a traditional building.


We expect to reduce heat lost by more than 70% compared to existing double-glazed windows by using Passive house certified windows. High quality external insulation added to our walls should reduce heat loss by up to 90% and our efficient heat recovery system can reduce ventilation heat losses by up to 90%.


This means very little additional heating/cooling will be required to maintain comfortable indoor temperatures. The vigorous planning procedures and calculations performed by the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) ensures there is no performance gap between the expected and actual building performance. We expect significantly lower energy consumption and we will have dramatically reduced our CO2 emissions. If more businesses built to theses standards, imagine what would be possible?! As our Founder and CEO Paul Chandler always says, “We have a responsibility as an active member of our community to ensure we leave this world better off than how we found it”.