In the months leading up to the 2025 PHIUS (Passive House Institute – US) Conference in Milwaukee (October 6 – 8, 2025), the PHIUS Alliance Wisconsin organized tours of certified projects across the state to showcase how sustainable building practices can integrate with beautiful architecture. One of the featured homes is the Starry Nights Farmhouse, located in rural Wisconsin near Burlington and Lake Geneva. Surrounded by farmland with cows, sheep, and traditional red barns, this residence stands out as a PHIUS-certified, net-zero passive home that combines high performance with its agricultural setting.
About Starry Nights Farmhouse
The owners of Starry Nights Farm welcomed us during the PHIUS tour and shared their story. Starry Nights Farm is a Certified Organic and Animal Welfare Approved farm where animals are raised in a sustainable and humane way. Paul, originally from Wisconsin, worked for 25 years in Chicago as a futures broker, while Marisa, originally from Puerto Rico, built her career as a CPA before becoming a yoga instructor and health coach. Together, they decided to purchase a 140-acre farm and move to Wisconsin, where they defined a mission centered on ethical animal care, ecological stewardship, and sustainable living. These same values are reflected in their home, a PHIUS-certified residence equipped with the CERV to ensure resilience, energy efficiency, and healthy indoor air. More about their journey and mission can be found on their website. Visitors can also experience the farm firsthand by staying at their home through Airbnb. The lower level of their beautiful PHIUS-certified residence is available for guests, offering a unique opportunity to enjoy the farm setting and the beauty of Wisconsin.
Passive House Design
Passive houses, with their highly efficient thermal envelopes, including walls, roofs, windows, and doors, maintain exceptionally low heating and cooling loads, which makes it possible to use smaller and more efficient mechanical systems. The Starry Nights Farmhouse is a PHIUS-certified single-family residence designed by Tom Bassett-Dilley Architects. The home is a new construction project located in ASHRAE Climate Zone 5A (Cool-Humid), with an interior conditioned floor area of about 3,500 ft². The Starry Nights Farmhouse achieved PHIUS certification in 2019, meeting strict energy conservation requirements.
The house incorporates key passive building features, including insulated concrete form (ICF) walls that provide both continuous insulation and thermal mass, along with triple-pane windows that enhance thermal performance. Careful detailing achieved an ultra-low measured airtightness of 0.6 ACH50. Mechanical systems include cold-climate air-source heat pumps with two mini-splits for conditioning the main and lower levels, complemented by a carbon dioxide–based air-to-water heat pump that supplies domestic hot water and radiant heating. A rooftop solar PV array offsets the annual energy demand, allowing the home to reach net-zero operation. With robust construction and quality materials, the home is durable and resilient, reducing maintenance needs over its lifetime. The passive house design, paired with solar panels, keeps energy bills low. Extra electricity produced in the summer is credited through net metering and helps cover heating costs during the winter.
Prioritizing Indoor Health in Passive House Design
While one of the primary goals of passive houses is to minimize energy use through a highly efficient thermal envelope, indoor air quality requires separate attention to ensure a truly healthy living environment. Even though passive houses excel at keeping outdoor pollutants from entering, pollutants generated indoors must be removed to maintain a healthy air. At Build Equinox, we view ventilation not simply as meeting a minimum standard, but as a foundation of healthy homes. A healthy home depends on continuous indoor air quality monitoring, since only what is measured can be effectively managed. In addition, air recirculation is essential for moving indoor air through high-efficiency filters (MERV-13 or higher), which remove fine particles and help maintain a clean, healthy environment for occupants.
Since building their home in 2019, Paul and Marisa have been among the first proud Passive House owners in a growing community who chose the CERV to ensure a healthy environment for themselves and their children. The system’s advanced heat pump technology recovers energy and conditions the air, making the ventilation process highly efficient. Bringing in fresh air is essential for diluting pollutants generated indoors. As fresh air enters the home, it is also filtered to remove particles and impurities before reaching the living spaces. The CERV can also run in recirculation mode, continuously cleaning indoor air through high-efficiency MERV 14 filters. Most importantly, the CERV integrates indoor air quality monitors for carbon dioxide (CO₂) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), providing real-time feedback to the damper system to deliver fresh, filtered air whenever it is needed.
Build Equinox is proud to support the Starry Nights Farmhouse with the CERV smart ventilation system. If you are considering a PHIUS-certified or high-performance project, we invite you to contact us for system integration support. Together, we can help transform the vision of your dream home into a healthy environment where your family can thrive, enjoy better sleep, and reduce the risk of respiratory illnesses.
