High Performance Windows for Every Climate

Resilient, climate-sensitive windows are essential components for homes at every price point. 

While Wythe Windows is known for providing high-performance windows for highly energy efficient Passive Houses in the Northeastern U.S., their products equally fit the goals for the VISION House Asheville: wellness, resilience and value. Innovative building products and systems will be part of this demonstration project by Green Builder Media and Alair Asheville | Red Tree, a member of Alair Homes, North America’s largest custom home building and renovation franchise. VISION House Asheville is a custom home in the Beaverdam community designed to showcase the future of residential building.

“High performance is not a cold-climate concept,” says Darren Macri, co-CEO of Wythe Windows. “A window's job is to control heat, air, moisture and sound — and that job doesn't get easier in a cooling-dominated climate, it gets different. The same triple-glazed, multi-chamber, airtight assembly that keeps January out of a Bronx apartment keeps August humidity out of a house in Asheville. What changes is the glass package, not the philosophy.”

Wythe Windows are American made on automated lines in a factory in Ramsey, N.J., which means they can be priced so they don’t have to be a luxury, according to Macri.

“That's not a flag-waving talking point — it's why our lead times are what they are, why a mistake gets fixed by a person you can call, and why custom sizing doesn't carry a custom price,” says Macri. “Roughly 60% of our business is affordable housing. The same window that goes into a high-design home goes into social housing.”

Values-Based Design

Green Builder Media’s value per square foot™ is a metric that integrates multiple elements that impact long-term affordability, including sustainability, decarbonization, water and energy conservation, wellness, comfort, resilience, equity and investment, into measuring what a home is worth. The value per square foot metric provides a long view of the true worth of a home instead of looking only at the upfront cost as is measured by price per square foot.

“Price per square foot has always flattered the wrong decisions,” says Macri. “It treats a window as a hole-filler and rewards whoever fills the hole cheapest, then hands the owner a bill every month for the next forty years. This shift is one we're glad to be measured against.”

Wythe Windows add value to homes in multiple ways, including:

• Efficiency. Windows are typically the weakest thermal element in the wall. Upgrading them is the single highest-leverage envelope decision available, with savings that compound annually for the life of the building.

• Resiliency. These highly rated and structurally tested windows mean the openings hold. Plus, the energy efficiency helps the home stay habitable through an outage.

• Wellness. High-performance windows provide something that can’t always be measured: quiet. “We all carry a sonic weight on our shoulders we've stopped noticing — traffic, mechanicals, the neighbor's leaf blower,” says Macri. “Behind these windows it lifts, and you feel lighter. That, plus dry glass in winter and a house that holds its temperature, is what people remember.”

• Independence. Lower energy loads require smaller mechanical systems, which means a solar array and battery covers a larger share of the house. “The envelope is what makes energy independence affordable rather than aspirational,” says Macri.

• Sustainability. Wythe Windows provide decades of avoided operational carbon, are manufactured domestically, and are engineered to still be square and sealed in year thirty rather than replaced in year fifteen.

“Our windows raise first costs less than people assume — factory-direct and automated, we're often at or below the price of common lower-performance brands — and they raise value per square foot simultaneously,” says Macri.

Climate Responsiveness and Resilience

One reason Asheville is an ideal location to showcase how the components of a high performance house work together is its climate, which has seasonal swings, humidity and a high elevation.

“That's actually the hardest assignment you can give a window — you need to keep heat in during a mountain January and keep heat and humidity out through a Southern summer,” says Macri. “Our answer is that the frame does the same job everywhere and the glass gets tuned to the site. Multi-chamber uPVC frames with steel reinforcement and triple glazing set the baseline, then we coordinate with the team to find that sweet spot for the solar gain and designing a glass package based on their energy model.”

Wythe Windows’ tilt function matters more than people might expect, Macri says.

“In a humid climate you want controlled, secure ventilation on the shoulder seasons and cool nights — the tilt position gives you air without an open, unsecured sash, so the house can be flushed at night and closed and dehumidified by day,” says Macri.

Third-party data supports the resiliency provided by tilt turn windows to wind, wind-driven rain, air filtration and forced entry.

At the height of any storm, the building envelope is the first line of defense and the openings in that envelope are where the building usually fails.

“Asheville learned in the hardest possible way what happens when weather exceeds what a building was designed for,” says Macri. “Everyone thinks about the roof. Very few people think about the fact that a window is a hole in the wall with a seal around it. A window that seals under compressive pressure at multiple points around its perimeter, in a frame with steel inside it, is a fundamentally different object than a window that latches once in the middle. Ours is independently rated Class AW-PG60 — the top architectural class in the North American Fenestration Standard, and a class most residential windows never test to at all.”

Equally important is resilience against power outages.

“When the envelope is this tight and this insulated, the house's heating and cooling loads drop far enough that a modest solar-plus-storage system can carry it through an outage, and the building coasts through days without power at survivable temperatures,” says Macri. “That is the difference between a house you evacuate and a house you shelter in.”

Wellness Benefits

Wellness architecture, another pillar of VISION House Asheville, is meant to generate physical, mental, emotional and financial wellbeing – and windows contribute to those benefits.

“An airtight window keeps outdoor particulate outside — that matters enormously near roadways and, increasingly, during wildfire smoke events,” says Macri. “Warm interior glass surfaces don't drop below the dew point, so you don't get the condensation that becomes the mold that becomes the indoor air quality problem. And the acoustic performance is genuinely transformative. People sleep better. They tell us about that before they tell us about their utility bill.”

The products that Wythe Windows will include at VISION House Asheville include:

• Triple-Glazed uPVC Tilt-Turn Windows: These triple glazed windows include coatings to reject summer solar gain without losing winter light. The multi-chamber frame includes six thermal layers and galvanized steel reinforcement to achieve third party tested air infiltration approximately 30 times tighter than standard windows permit.

• uPVC Entry Doors: The entry doors have the same envelope system as the windows, with continuous compressive gasketing to seal the entry. The result is an entry that stays square, sealed and quiet for the life of the building.

• Smart Slide Doors: The smart slide mechanism draws the panel in against continuous gaskets and engages multi-point hardware, producing a compressive seal comparable to a fixed unit — while remaining light enough to operate with one hand.

For more information, visit Wythe Windows.