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ZeroEnergy Design creates a contemporary, energy efficient home set in the dunes in Gloucester.

- NANCY A. RUHLING

Deep in the dunes on the Gloucester beachfront, there lives a new Cape Cod modern-style house that literally has risen from the ashes.

What happened was this. The owners had just renovated the old house, which is on eight acres in a remote, ecologically sensitive area reached by a long, winding road, when it caught fire and burned to the ground.

Shocked and devastated—“There was nothing left—the greatest loss was the years of our lives and our kids’ lives that we weren’t able to be there,” the homeowner says,—the couple commissioned Boston-based ZeroEnergy Design, whose forte is modern high-performance architecture, to create a replacement.

“We wanted a house that exploited the views, connected the indoors with the outdoors, and was energy efficient enough to weather the elements all year round,” the homeowner says.

The ZeroEnergy Design team, led by senior architect Matt Genaze, AIA CPHC LEED AP, and managing director Stephanie Horowitz, AIA CPHC, created a super-insulated, airtight, all-electric house, complete with solar panels, triple-glazed windows, and a continuous ventilation system that aligns with the Passive House standard. It was expertly crafted by the team at Covenant LLC.

“In every project, we combine the allure of great design with high-performance assemblies that disappear,” Genaze says. “The solar panels on this house, for instance, are tucked back from the edge of the roof— you can’t see them unless you fly a drone overhead.”

Using the existing footprint, the team designed a three-story house that is in sync with its surroundings.

The massing, a pair of connected squares joined in the middle, and two main roofs pitched at different angles, is augmented by triangular bump-outs. Genaze and Horowitz were inspired by the undulations of the constantly shifting dunes.