A charitable trust founded in Christchurch in 2015 has quietly become one of the most effective knowledge-sharing platforms in Australasian construction. Here is what it is, how it works, and why Australian builders should be paying attention.
Most movements in the construction industry start with a complaint.
The Super Home Movement started with a child with asthma.
After the Christchurch earthquakes displaced thousands of families, architectural designer Bob Burnett found himself rotating through a series of rental homes with his young children. The homes were cold. They were damp. They were legally compliant. And his kids started developing asthma.
His doctor told him it was the mould. The moisture in the house.
Burnett’s response was not to write to a politician. It was to build something better and then build a platform to show the rest of the industry how to do the same.
In 2015, the Super Home Movement was born.
What the Data Says
The connection between New Zealand’s housing stock and public health is not anecdotal. It is one of the most consistent findings in the country’s medical research literature.
Research from the University of Otago, funded by the Health Research Council of New Zealand, found that children living in homes with dampness, mould and water leaks were up to five times more likely to be hospitalised with a respiratory infection. The same study concluded that close to 20 per cent of hospital admissions of young children with acute respiratory infections could be prevented if housing was free from damp and mould, saving close to eight million dollars annually in hospital costs alone.
New Zealand has one of the highest rates of childhood asthma in the world. The rate of bronchiectasis hospitalisation in children under 15 tripled in 15 years. Childhood hospitalisation for bronchiolitis increased by nearly half between 2000 and 2017.
These are not statistics that sit comfortably alongside a building code that the Super Home Movement describes as “over 20 years behind other developed OECD countries.”
The Superhome Movement Charitable Trust is direct about it: “Almost all new homes are being built to the lowest standard allowed by law. We have some of the worst health statistics in the world related to poor housing.”
How the Movement Works
The Super Home Movement is structured as a charitable trust. It does not exist to sell products or certify buildings as a commercial exercise. It exists to lift industry knowledge.
Its activities include public education programs, open home tours that allow the public to walk through high-performance homes, industry continuing education, consumer workshops, professional networking and direct lobbying of local and national government toward improved building standards.
The open-source model is deliberate. Ideas, techniques, technologies and design approaches are shared freely among builders, architects, engineers, designers, suppliers and trades. Nobody profits from a fellow professional learning how to build better.
“We connect designers, builders, researchers, education providers, government, stakeholders and leading experts in the industry to achieve collaboration toward higher building standards,” the trust states.
That framing is important. The movement is not adversarial toward the industry. It is operating inside it, trying to pull standards up from within.
Base, Better, Best: A Practical Pathway
One of the more practically useful things the Super Home Movement has developed is its certification framework: base, better and best.
The framework acknowledges that not every client can afford or wants the most advanced high-performance build. Rather than positioning premium performance as all-or-nothing, the certification gives builders and clients a clear, graduated pathway.
At the base level, a home meets a defined set of performance criteria that go meaningfully beyond code minimum. Better adds to those. Best represents the highest current standard: full thermal modelling, airtightness testing, high-performance glazing with recessed installation, balanced mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, renewable energy integration and sustainable materials.
The movement has also produced a Superhome Design Guide, released publicly and free to access, setting out how to build a new healthy high-performance home from the ground up. A companion renovation guide was added more recently, addressing the significant portion of the housing stock that will never be demolished and rebuilt but can still be improved.
What a Super Home Actually Includes
The technical specifications behind a Super Home draw from passive house principles without requiring full passive house certification. Homes are thermally modelled. Blower door tests check airtightness. Glazing is positioned to sit in the warm zone of the wall, eliminating the condensation that builds at the cold edge of conventional aluminium window installations.
Key performance elements include insulated slab edges to eliminate thermal bridging at the foundation, high-performance wall systems with continuous insulation, recessed high-performance windows, a balanced ventilation system with heat recovery to maintain fresh air without losing heat, and solar integration either installed or pre-wired for.
Materials are assessed for embodied carbon and environmental impact. Sustainable sourcing is considered. The aim is a home that is healthy not just in how it performs thermally, but in what it is made of.
The result is a home that costs more to build upfront. The Super Home Movement does not pretend otherwise. What it does is reframe the calculation.
“Rather than spending $2,000 on a stone benchtop, why not put $2,000 into extra insulation and change the benchtop later on?” Dan Saunders, founding participant, Super Home Movement
A home that maintains 18 to 21 degrees without significant heating costs is not just more comfortable. It eliminates power bills that, for an average inefficient New Zealand home, can run to around $11,000 a year. That saving, redirected to a mortgage, changes a household’s financial position over the life of the loan.
The Industry Collaboration Model
What distinguishes the Super Home Movement from most industry certification schemes is the collaborative architecture at its centre.
The movement brings together builders, designers, suppliers, engineers, academics and real estate professionals. It runs annual home tours that open certified projects to public inspection. It hosts webinars and continuing education sessions. It produces publicly available guides.
And it actively supports builders who are transitioning toward higher performance standards, not just builders who have already arrived there.
That transition support matters because the shift from standard construction to high-performance building is not simple. There are new details to learn: how to correctly recess a window into the thermal zone of a wall, how to test for airtightness, how to integrate a heat recovery ventilation system, how to sequence the build to protect the airtight layer.
Builders who attempt that transition without guidance make expensive mistakes. The Super Home Movement exists in part to make those lessons available before the mistakes happen.
Zero Carbon: The Next Evolution
The movement is now pushing into territory that most of the industry has yet to seriously engage with: embodied carbon and zero carbon construction.
The Nga Whare Parara development currently underway in Christchurch includes what is set to become New Zealand’s first certified carbon zero Super Home. The project minimises concrete and steel, uses laminated glulam timber structural elements and has been assessed by carbon specialists as sequestering eight tonnes of carbon through its material selection and construction process.
Bob Burnett Architecture, the co-founder’s firm, has certified every home it designs to Super Home standards of base, better or best. The argument being tested in Nga Whare Parara is that zero carbon residential construction is not a research exercise. It is a delivery model.
“A lot of the houses could be low or zero carbon just by changing a few things,” DS Construction’s Dan Saunders, a founding participant in the movement, told The Good Builder Podcast. “Tweaking what you’d ideally want as a cladding and just changing a few things. I don’t think it’s going to be that hard.”
The Lobbying Side
The Super Home Movement is not only educational. It actively lobbies government.
New Zealand’s building code energy efficiency clause, H1, was significantly updated in 2021, approximately doubling insulation requirements for new homes. Further changes have continued through 2024 and into 2025, with the schedule method of compliance being removed in favour of calculation and modelling pathways.
The movement has been part of that reform process, attending meetings with housing ministers and providing submissions. Saunders is candid about the limitations of that process.
“They give you lip service a lot of the time,” he said. “You go to see this person, talked about this building system. Then just walk away to the next meeting.”
The follow-through, he argues, remains the problem. Incremental changes to H1 have improved insulation minimums in some areas without addressing the whole-of-building system that performance requires. Mandating a higher minimum R-value for glazing is useful. Not also mandating that the glazing be recessed into the thermal zone of the wall means the improvement is only partial.
“You can’t play a game with one rule,” Saunders said. “You’ve got to have a whole lot of different rules to make the game work and flow properly.”
Why Australian Builders Should Pay Attention
The Super Home Movement is a New Zealand initiative. But the problems it addresses are not unique to New Zealand.
Australia’s National Construction Code operates on the same floor-not-ceiling logic as the New Zealand building code. Energy efficiency requirements have been progressively updated, with the NCC 2022 lifting minimum requirements including the shift to a seven-star energy rating for new homes. But a seven-star minimum is still a minimum.
The healthy homes conversation is growing louder in Australia. Building biologists, passive house trainers and performance-focused builders are increasingly vocal about the gap between what the code requires and what a genuinely healthy, low-cost-to-run home looks like.
What the Super Home Movement offers is a model for how that conversation can be institutionalised. Not as a regulator. Not as a product certification scheme. But as an industry-led, open-source knowledge platform that makes it easier for any builder to build better.
The movement’s structure, charitable trust, open access, graduated certification, public home tours, professional networking and government lobbying, is replicable. The question is whether the Australian industry has the appetite to build something similar.
The Super Home Movement would probably say: start with the why.
THE GOOD BUILDER TAKE
The Super Home Movement is not a niche operation for high-end builders. It is a deliberate, well-structured knowledge platform designed to move an entire industry toward better outcomes.
Its open-source model, its graduated certification framework and its commitment to public education represent a different way of thinking about industry improvement. Not from the top down, through regulation. But from within, through collaboration.
Australian builders watching the healthy homes conversation grow louder have something useful here. Not a template to copy wholesale, but a proof of concept that industry-led standards uplift actually works.
The question for Australia is not whether we need something like this. It is who is going to build it.
Find out more about the Super Home Movement at superhome.co.nz. The Superhome Design Guide and Renovation Guide are available free of charge on the website.
General information only. Not professional advice. Verify details with relevant authorities and seek independent guidance for your specific circumstances.
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