FAQs

All the questions. All the answers. Well, maybe. Most of them, anyway.

General

What does Croft do?

Short Answer

We make buildings!

  • Using our panelized prefab system, we can make almost any type of building, and build it to high-performance standards. Sometimes we design them, sometimes we build other people’s designs, but either way, you’ll always end up with an excellent final product.

    Our buildings are made with healthy, natural materials with very short supply chains. The materials we use are produced without toxic additives or any other nastiness required to achieve their exceptional levels of performance. These buildings have the magic formula for durability: air-tight and vapor-open (read: no mold), super-insulated with materials with Class A flame and smoke spread rating, all while using readily understandable and futureproof building methods ready for renovation and additions. Meaning, that if mother nature continues to outsmart even our best-laid plans, these buildings can withstand “seeing a little weather” and still last for generations. 

    We gear our supply chains towards the lowest impact, most environmentally friendly materials we can possibly source: natural, non-toxic materials (like agricultural wheat straw) that capture and store up to 60X more atmospheric CO2 than they take to produce. This makes our buildings a carbon capture and storage medium: an active, actual net positive in addressing the challenges of climate change.

    Then, there’s how we fabricate those buildings. Unlike the typical site-built approach, we pre-fabricate the entire building off-site in our factory in beautiful mid-coast Maine. We divide the building into easy to handle building blocks that click together on site in a matter of days, not months. This means less damage or delay due to weather exposure, and more safety, dignity, and inclusivity in the process of construction. A typical single-family home takes about four days with a crane to put together. We also do our best to set up the contractors who arrive downstream of our work for success–folks like electricians, plumbers, and trim carpenters. This approach requires foresight, commitment to detail, and a deep familiarity with and respect for both broad-strokes construction sequencing and finish-level detailing–but that’s why we’re here.

    Lastly, we also design buildings. We’re designers that straddle the studio and field (what to label ourselves? Archenters? Carpentects?) and can design one and two-family dwellings or small purpose-built structures like saunas and chapels before needing to partner with a licensed architect or engineer in the state of Maine. We approach our design work with the same care, precision, and environmental ethics that we bring to our builds.

How do I work with Croft?

Short Answer

That depends on the project! We work hand-in-hand with homeowners, architects, developers, and general contractors and will adapt accordingly to your project’s goals. Our highest value is in providing the building enclosure (i.e. the weathertight, structural shell of the building), constructed to exacting specifications in our factory and assembled on site in a fraction of the time that site-built construction would require.

  • Are you a… Homeowner-to-be? Great! Hello. You are about to embark on a big adventure. To ensure success, we suggest assembling a dream team of folks who will help you on this journey, all along the way. If you are building a single family home or duplex, we at Croft can help with design services, and we’d point you first toward our Croft Kits. These are an excellent starting point for virtually any home in the northeast: compact, efficient, and resource-smart buildings designed with natural daylighting, inspiring layouts, and flexible floor plans. Whether you use Croft’s designs or hire an architect for your design, we’d also encourage you to seek out a reputable general contractor in your area who can oversee the foundation and site work prior to Croft’s panels flying and who can then take the reins afterwards to complete the finishes and fitments of the building.

    Architect? We aim to please: Croft’s quality control, rapid assembly times, minimal site impacts, and trusted, science-backed assemblies bring elevated value to nearly any project. Our factory-produced buildings are a great solution for your projects; from urban rooftops to granite piers on offshore islands, Croft can and will deliver to almost any setting! We’ll do the (literal) heavy lifting, and the result is a weathertight, high-performance building ready to be kitted out by the local team of subcontractors.

    Developer? Croft offers a unique value-add within the development space; a regeneratively-sourced, healthy, high-performance building designed from the ‘structure outward’ with keen awareness and attention to the details–all baked-in to one point of contact. Not only can Croft deliver an exceptional level of quality control, we can do so without the labor bottlenecks or weather delays inherent in site built construction all in a fraction of the time.

Why don’t you do the whole building?

Short Answer

Believe us, we’d do more if we could! Due to an uneven patchwork of inspection & code protocols here in the US, we’re not allowed to do much more than frame, insulate, and wrap your enclosure off-site. But, rest assured, the Croft system sets up the other talented local folks you’re working with—plumbers, electricians, and finish carpenters—so they can pick up seamlessly where we leave off.

  • We are specialists. That empowers us to oversee, control, and dictate our own supply chain to our high standards. We run an exceptionally efficient prefab shop to further ensure a climate-friendly product and deliver a finite scope of work that allows us to be meticulously detailed in what we do: encapsulating and delivering the entire weathertight building enclosure. To do this, we already employ a jumble of trades–engineering, design, and carpentry rolled into one value-packed whole.  No one else does quite what we do, so we feel beholden to keep delivering the work we’re good at!  A well-designed enclosure is a bridge to a beautiful project.

    However, every once in a great while we do go all-in on a complete build. Croft brings the same rigorous standards to virtually every step of the build that we bring to our prefab work; this means prioritizing healthy materials and environmental impact first and foremost. You’ll see this in the nature of the work we take all the way: granite block foundations, natural plaster finishes, and innovative space heating solutions. We generally reserve space each year for one or two projects that match our ambitious criteria for environmental, energy, and quality-of-life goals. Feel free to reach out if you think your placemaking project is the right fit.

Can I have skinnier walls?

Short Answer

No.

  • We are pretty adaptable to a lot of design requests, but first and foremost, we consider ourselves a climate-friendly company. That means we are 100% committed to making buildings that don’t require much energy–if any– to operate, because our buildings last a very long time and the design decisions we make today set in place patterns of energy use that will echo far into the future. New buildings are a multigenerational commitment; we aren’t just building for what the world looks like today, we are building the future we want to see. The folks walking the earth right now owe it to future generations to steward resources as responsibly as we can, and superinsulating with straw is a phenomenal way to create a more comfortable building, store carbon, and defray future energy consumption. We use thick walls to get there. However, F.N.T.T.W. (Fear Not These Thick Walls). With thoughtful window layout, every view to the outside becomes a window seat or counter-top extension or nook for books and plants. You’ll have a bright, inviting contemporary space and nice deep windowsills.

Budget

What is your price per square foot?

Short Answer

You control that more than we do! (see long answer.)

  • Croft is here to reinvent an industry, not run off with your pocketbook. We have built projects for folks of all walks of life, from farmers to empty nesters to first-time homeowners to island getaways. We have a flexible system that can be used in all sorts of applications, and the good news is that the enclosure of your new home is only a portion of the overall building project, and one you don’t want to cut corners on (lest it, you know, fall down). The other parts of your build, truth-be-told, all make a much larger impact on your budget: what is your site like? What kind of countertops will you be putting in? Will you be doing clear-grained hardwood flooring or planks of knotty pine? Decisions like that can impact your budget far greater than your decision to build a Croft envelope versus a code-minimum building envelope. Think of it this way: fretting over the cost of the building enclosure is like looking at the total price of a hamburger, and trying to change out the bun for wonder bread for sake of saving a few pennies. Sure, you save a few pennies, but you really just end up with a worse hamburger that still costs mostly what it did before because of the meat, tomatoes, pickles, etc. weren’t economized in the same way.

    However, this is not to say construction is inexpensive, because it’s not. Building things ain’t cheap. We live and breathe this stuff every day and constantly run up against the hard reality of the economics: cutting up parts of the world and moving them around to make new things requires vast amounts of energy, time, and effort, and that requires some real coin!

    We have a few cards up our sleeve to ensure economical, futureproof, beautiful buildings, but they still need to be constructed (with love) by people who also have grocery bills and kids to feed. Our in-house designs, which are optimized for our panel system, price out somewhere in the range $30-$34/ ft2 of envelope area, which is pretty darn good in an already competitive industry.

    We know, love, and design for panelization, so all of our in-house designs bake in as many efficiencies and optimizations as possible to maximize the economy of our offerings. Though it is possible, adapting a fully-completed design for prefabrication doesn’t necessarily ensure that you’ll reap all the benefits and efficiencies of our system off-the-bat. Engaging with Croft early in the design process is a great place to start to optimize your design early on for panelization.

Is there a price difference between the R-45 wall and R-60 wall?

Short Answer

Not really.

  • The two wall systems have been developed more as purpose-built solutions than as a cost-savings measure. The “skinnier” R-45 wall is aimed at multifamily and affordable housing projects where dimensional requirements push for minimum unit square footage count and ADA clearances. While they are both perfectly suitable for single-family construction, we’ll always suggest the R-60 wall for single-family construction. The price difference is miniscule as every component still has to be made and every assembly sequence still needs to be followed to create that panel.

Performance & Technical

How do you compare with conventional construction?

Short Answer

Think of Croft’s building system as “super-normal.” Carpenters will understand it both today and one-hundred years from now, but our buildings still outperform most of what gets built today.

  • We build with easily-understood industry standards, just with a high-performance and natural materials twist. Within a few minutes, most builders/ plumbers/ electricians and other folks on a jobsite can jump into their work without trying to understand some black-box high-tech wall system. 90% of our panel system is done to typical IRC framing standards. The last 10% of our system is where we put our decades of experience to work; elegant, in-house solutions for efficient fabrication in the factory and rapid easy assembly on site with little more than a cordless screwgun. 100% of our system is built to stringent Passive House standards as a baseline for both airtightness and insulation levels.

Won’t all that straw burn/ decay/ attract pests/ etc.?

Short Answer

Nope.

  • Straw naturally bioaccumulates silica while it grows, which makes it both remarkably fire-resistant and unpalatable to pests. This high silica content also makes it resistant to rot (in fact, much more so than virtually all the other materials in the wall–wood framing, plywood sheathing, drywall, etc.) 

     And what about all of those horror stories of the hay barn burning down? Good question that brings up an important and often-made mix-up. The stuff in those barns was hay, which is very different from a material properties perspective. Not to get too deep in the weeds (pun-intended) on the difference between the two, but commercially grown hay contains all the big juicy seedheads which make it nutritious fodder for animals. Those same seeds–if allowed to sit for prolonged periods of time at a very high moisture level–can ferment and spontaneously combust. Frankly, when kept dry, either would be fine as a building material, but our mantra remains: Hay is for horses, straw is for houses.

What’s with all the “carbon capture & storage” talk?

Short Answer

Well, we’ve got some environmental challenges these days. Hopefully, this isn’t news to you, but if it is, don’t worry because Croft is here to offer practical, inexpensive, and immediately actionable solutions to these very same challenges. Read on below for more information.

  • Thanks to a chemical conversion that occurs naturally in growing plants, every pound of carbon in a plant’s mass actually represents 3.67 pounds of CO2 pulled directly out of thin air. And everything we know about our changing climate is telling us we have too much of that CO2 stuff in the air. So, if you can take those plants, process them properly, and then stuff them inside a warm dry space for hundreds of years, you’ve effectively “shelved” that carbon by taking it out of the atmosphere for the lifetime of the building. And with the way we build, that could be hundreds of years. Super-insulating a typical 2,000 sq ft home with straw would result in as much as 60 tons of CO2 being locked up in that house. And that’s one home. Imagine if we built all new homes in the US each year with this approach. Fun fact: we already grow enough wheat for food production that we could do this five times over, using just straw we are growing anyway.

    Straw is plentiful, affordable, incredibly durable, insulative both thermally and acoustically, and it smells nice. What about wood, you ask? Sure, wood is good–and we use plenty of it. But, in order for a material to be considered “carbon storing,” you need to factor in how long that material takes to grow and its carbon-cost of harvesting. Trees do a really great job of locking away carbon, so great that if they can mostly stay where they are (standing in the forest), they will continue to lock away more and more carbon over their lifetimes. The growth cycle of spruce/ pine/ fir is 90+ years. For straw, the growing cycle is six months. Pretty easy math.

Why not volumetric modular?

Short Answer

We’re not opposed to it!

  • Volumetric modular has its own benefits and compromises. Often, the additional costs of moving around a big three-dimensional box filled with mostly air can be more costly than is flat-packed cousin, panelized prefab. We’ve found panelization to be a more adaptable, agile, and flexible design solution for a more diverse array of applications. All that said, we can and will produce volumetric modular when a project merits it! Urban infill lots with excellent crane access are a good candidate for the potential speed benefits of volumetric modular.

How does the Croft approach differ from other green building approaches (mass timber/ mushroom foam/ hempcrete/ etc.)?

Short Answer

If there was a better way to make buildings, believe us, we’d do it.

  • Unlike many other green building materials and approaches, Croft’s system is thoroughly low-impact. Our materials are minimally processed–if at all–and we lean on the natural strengths and durability of these materials lent by nature and build in ways that maximize and prolong those strengths.  Many other green building materials require intense manufacturing processes involving wasted heat energy, petroleum-based binders, or environmentally questionable preservatives to achieve long-term durability. We just build simply and sensibly, with superb materials that are close to their native state, making for an ideal “climate solution” wrapped in one tidy package.

What do you treat the straw with?

Short Answer

Care.