From designer to builder to occupant, Brett Sichello found the biggest surprise wasn’t in the numbers, but in the silence of living inside his own work.

Most mornings, Passive House designer Brett Sichello woke before the crew arrived. In a small camper parked beside a forested build site that abuts a river, he’d open his laptop, revise designs and field emails from clients. Then he’d step outside and get to work building his home: framing walls, setting windows, running cladding, and installing the seam metal roofing, alone or with a small crew.

For 18 months, the Kelowna-based residential designer split his time between two worlds. He lived on-site during the week, drove two hours home on weekends, and ran his design firm in the margins.

“It was hard as hell, but so incredibly life changing for our family,” he said.

The house, elevated on piers to withstand both floods and packed with resilience measures to protect from fire, is built this way not from a specific technical resilience requirement, but because of the way Passive House makes you think about place, he said.

Unlike some building standards, Passive House starts with context. Altitude, sun exposure, vegetation, wind patterns, and local hazards are the foundation, he said. Sichello describes it as a discipline that forces you to design specific to the site and in his case, that meant planning for both rising water and encroaching wildfire.

That philosophy shaped every detail of the project. The cladding is non-combustible. The windows are triple-glazed and tempered. The soffits are designed to keep out embers. Even the floor assembly, exposed to air on all sides, was a trade-off between performance and flood resilience.

Finding Unexpected Silence

As a residential designer, Sichello had spent years drawing high-performance buildings for others. But only through building one himself did he fully grasp the disconnect between design, construction, and lived experience.

The drawings were precise and every light was modelled but translating them into built form, through weather, long days, unexpected surprises, and the physical fatigue of the job site was something else entirely.

“I gained a whole different level of respect for site supervisors and the millions of decisions that they have to make in a day on a construction project,” he said.

At this month’s Passive House Pulse Kelowna event, Sichello will share lessons from the experience, both as a designer who built his own project, and as a homeowner living in the result. His presentation will include performance data from the first year in the house, including energy use, air quality, and the human experience of living in a well-built, well-sealed home.

As part of his presentation, he will touch on the acoustic comfort of the house. The airtight construction and quiet systems created a level of stillness he hadn’t anticipated, a calm he says you don’t realize until you live in it.

“So our friends, when they come visit, they now joke that our house is the spa, because it provides this calming effect that you didn’t even know existed before,” he said.

For him, that was the biggest surprise of building and living in a Passive House.

“Passive House is about endless numbers and quantifying everything, but you can’t quantify comfort,” he said. “You can’t put a dollar value on your indoor air quality, your thermal comfort.

We live in such a noisy world and are so accustomed to the hum of daily life that we don’t truly understand what we are missing until you experience pure silence, said Sichello.

“It is so incredibly different from a conventional building or house, and you don’t even realize it until you’re in it,” he said.

A 2023 review identifies noise pollution as a major public health problem, linking it to hearing loss, sleep disruption, cardiovascular disease, and a range of mental health effects including anxiety and depression. The World Health Organization ranks noise pollution as one of the most damaging environmental threats to human health, exceeded only by air pollution, reports a 2022 CBC news article.

From Saskatchewan Winters to Passive House Pioneer

Sichello’s path into high-performance design began in a small Saskatchewan town, where the tallest buildings barely cleared two stories, but where he learned what minus 40 winters felt like and how to swing a hammer from his “jack-of-all-trades” father. Later, after studying architecture at Ryerson (now Toronto Metropolitan University), he worked on major commercial projects. These were massive concrete, steel, and glass towers that taught him a lot about complexity but left him questioning whether so-called “green” labels matched reality.

He encountered buildings awarded LEED plaques yet built with the same two-by-six walls and double-glazed windows he had grown up with in Saskatchewan.

“It just seemed kind of ridiculous,” he said. “Surely we could do a bit better.”

The breakthrough came around 2010 when he was looking for something better and found Passive House. He enrolled in one of Canada’s earliest Passive House courses. The framework, first developed in Germany in the 1990s, felt like the missing piece. He studied up back when the internet was a bit of a “black hole” when it came to Passive House. He could be found in those days using Google Translate to understand German language Passive House resources. Soon after, he launched his own practice, focusing on single-family projects where homeowners were willing – more than a large developer – to invest in insulation, airtightness, and high-performance windows for homes they would live in rather than sell.

More than a decade later, that persistence has made Sichello a veteran Passive House designer. The community he works in has shaped him into a practitioner at the forefront of resilience. Building his own home has made him a more balanced, empathetic collaborator. And now a quiet riverside retreat has given him a place to live, work and experience the benefits of that persistence.