Indio NZE Retrofit Wins Best Rehab Award

The Silicon Valley Business Journal has awarded the Indio building, at 435 Indio Way in Sunnyvale, CA, the best rehab project for 2014.

Integral collaborated with the developer Kevin Bates of Sharp Development, Hillhouse Construction, and RMW Architecture on the award-winning space. The design team retrofit the existing 30,000-square-foot, uninsulated office building to be a net zero energy targeted building, creating a new and replicable model for profitable net zero retrofits in Silicon Valley. The building, which is 100% daylit and 100% naturally ventilated, leased out in record time.

“We wanted to prove that this type of sustainable renovation is not only cost-effective, but actually more profitable than the old way of doing things,” Bates told the Silicon Valley Business Journal.

“Developers get a pretty bad reputation for always wanting to build the cheapest thing possible, and usually it’s spot on,” Andary told the Journal. “But Kevin said this could turn out to be better than ‘business as usual,’ and we helped him prove that point.”

Bates and Integral’s David Kaneda and John Andary are presenting the Indio story this year at US Green Building Council’s Greenbuild in a session called Real Estate Sea Change: The Business Case for Zero Energy Cost Buildings (session H12 at 9:30 AM on Friday, October 24th).

  • Integral’s Shannon Allison led the MEP design and team
  • Integral’s Alex Krickx did the energy modeling for passive strategies and PV sizing
  • Integral’s Ariel Heintze did the daylight modeling and numerous skylight design iterations
  • Integral’s Steve Chapes got Indio to Net Zero with his PV design

To learn more about Sharp Development’s sustainable approach to development, visit SageSpace and read A Real Estate Developer’s Case for Net Zeroon the Integral Group Design Blog. For more information on the Indio project or a comment from Integral on the award, please contact John Andary: [email protected].

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