Nearly 40 Years of Leadership Designing Healthful,
High Performance Green Homes
Serving You & Future Generations
Since 1975, Environment Associates has been committed to lowering their clients’ Living Cost by creating superior living environments for those seeking quality of life at home. Their homes demonstrate the dramatic economic, environmental, and social benefits derived from striving to build sustainably.
Environment Associates’ signature work, eaDesign for Life™, enhances livability and comfort in normal times and assures survivability in relative comfort during times of extreme weather and power outages. EA’s unique wholistic approach to planning & design significantly lowers our clients’ Living Cost while delivering year-round enjoyment.
Environment Associates homes are extraordinarily energy-efficient. In 2011, the hottest year so far recorded for Houston, the average monthly energy bill was only $108 (without any solar PV) for Houston’s “Cost Efficient LEED Home,” which has the equivalent interior volume of a 5,800 square-foot home. This probably ranks this Environment Associates “Wareloft” at the very top of the best energy-performing homes in Houston. While each client controls the final outcome of our work, like most EA homes, this example could easily go beyond net-zero and also become a revenue-producing generator with the addition of solar PV (solar electric) system.
Passive design strategies reduce energy use, enhance health, improve comfort, and enable homes to go off-grid to become net zero energy (and even revenue producing income) if desired. Climate-appropriate design, materials, and superior custom construction methods offer low-maintenance durability, low-cost operation, healthy indoor quality, resiliency, and design aesthetics that delight owners, families, and visitors.
Pioneering green architecture in Texas since 1975
EcoArchitect LaVerne Williams, AIA, LEED AP, is the Texas green building pioneer who founded Environment Associates in 1975. As a regional authority on environmentally responsive architecture, he has a proven passion for cultivating and advancing responsible living through high-performance green homes in Texas and beyond that strive for sustainability. Williams designed the first green building project in Texas that really caught the public’s attention, and which launched the green building movement in Texas. More than 30,000 people toured Houston’s Passive Solar Demonstration Home, sponsored by the Southern Solar Energy Center, in 1979-80.
Williams’s work help craft the internationally renowned Austin Green Building Program. This was the only US pro-ecology effort honored at the international 1992 Earth Summit, which became the model for US Green Building Council’s LEED green building certification program and international green building programs. Green homes being built by Houston’s Habitat for Humanity are patterned directly upon a study of LaVerne’s work by Houston’s renowned think tank, the Houston Advanced Research Center.
Today, Environment Associates’ success and influence has been built mostly by referrals gained from the exceptional results of their work. Through their tireless efforts to teach Texans about the value and benefits of cost efficient sustainable building practices, countless families now enjoy homes that reflect their values and embody respect for the quality of life of all living things.
National USGBC and Texas Regional Awards
EA projects have won the most prestigious green building awards nationally (USGBC Platinum) and locally (Austin GBP 5 Star) several times over, including the first Certified LEED home in the Texas Hill Country (in Hunt). Environment Associates is the first Houston firm to complete a Certified LEED Platinum project anywhere on the planet: a double award LEED Platinum/Austin Green Building Program 5 Star home in Austin, Texas. This home also has garnered two more firsts for Austin, the birthplace of green building programs. It is the first Certified LEED home and the first Certified LEED Platinum building project of any kind to be completed there.
Environment Associates was awarded the coveted “Hershey Conservation Award” and the “Egret Award” by the Houston Audubon Society in 1993, the only architecture firm ever so honored.
FOUNDER:
LaVerne A. Williams, AIA, LEED AP
Architect & Building Ecologist, Bioneer, Founder & CEO
Click here to Learn more about LaVerne Williams
TEAM:
Jan Wheeler
Office Administrator
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Richard Rivera LEED AP
B.S. Architecture / B.S. Engineering
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Juan J. Hron
B.S. Architecture / B.F.A. Interior Design
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Xiomara Ojeda
B.S. Architecture
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Maria Gonzalez
B.S. Architecture / B.S. Environmental Design
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