Christchurch builder Dan Saunders has spent three decades building homes that perform well beyond the code. His message for Australian builders is simple: the code is the floor, not the ceiling.

There is a line Dan Saunders uses when he talks about the New Zealand building code.

“The building code here is the worst house you’re legally allowed to build.”

It is blunt. It is deliberate. And it captures the philosophy that has shaped more than three decades of work for the Christchurch builder behind DS Construction.

Saunders joined The Good Builder Podcast and the conversation covered everything from healthy homes and building to passive house standards, prefabricated panel systems and what it actually takes to leave a good legacy in this industry.

What came through clearly was not technical expertise, though there is plenty of that. It was the conviction that building a home carries a moral responsibility.

“What’s my legacy going to be?” he asked. “My legacy is not going to be building crappy houses that make people unhealthy.”

Where It Starts: Code is Not Enough

Saunders has been building since 1993. By 2012, he had built the first eight HomeStar-rated house in Australasia, the highest rating achieved at the time. Since then he has built close to 30 high-performance homes.

But the journey did not start with passive house certifications or energy modelling software. It started with a growing understanding that meeting code was not the same as building a good home.

The New Zealand Building Code, like Australia’s National Construction Code, sets minimum standards. For structural integrity, weathertightness, insulation and fire safety, compliance is the legal threshold. What it does not require is that a home actually performs.

A code-compliant home can still be cold, damp, poorly ventilated and expensive to run. For Saunders, that was never good enough.

“I won’t build below this level,” he said, drawing a line above the code. “If someone doesn’t want to heed my advice, I’ll walk away from the job.”

“Every dollar we spend building healthy homes could save four dollars in the health system.” Dan Saunders, DS Construction

The Health Cost Nobody Talks About

The connection between housing quality and health is well documented in New Zealand, and the research is uncomfortable reading.

University of Otago studies have found that children are up to five times more likely to be hospitalised for respiratory infections if they live in homes with dampness, mould and water leaks. Research published in the Health Research Council of New Zealand found that nearly 20 per cent of hospital admissions of young children with acute respiratory infections could be prevented if their houses were free from damp and mould.

Saunders referenced this directly. He has seen the evidence on his own projects.

“I’m doing a little addition on a house that’s about 10 years old,” he told us. “I pulled the bricks off and there’s black mould on the paper on the building wrap. After 10 years.”

For a builder who thinks about legacy, this is not a quality assurance problem. It is a social one.

New Zealand has one of the highest rates of childhood asthma in the world. The connection to cold, damp, poorly performing homes is consistently supported by research. Every house built below a meaningful performance standard is a compounding health liability.

“There’s statistics in New Zealand where every dollar we spend in building healthy homes, you save four dollars in the health system,” Saunders said.

That calculation changes how you think about the upfront cost of building better.

The Super Home Framework

In 2015, Saunders became a founding participant in the Super Home Movement, a New Zealand charitable trust that uses open-source knowledge sharing to push building standards beyond the code.

The movement was co-founded by architectural designer Bob Burnett after his family was displaced by the Christchurch earthquakes and his children developed asthma living in poorly performing rental homes. Burnett and Saunders arrived at the same conclusion from different directions: the standard was not good enough, and the industry needed to change it from within.

The Super Home Movement operates with a certification framework of base, better and best, giving builders and clients a practical pathway to better performance without requiring passive house certification as the only endpoint.

“A passive house, if they’re not certified, they still follow the same process,” Saunders explained. “They get to the same end goal. A healthy home.”

The movement runs public home tours, industry webinars, consumer workshops and direct lobbying of New Zealand’s housing minister. Over the years it has put roughly 10,000 people through high-performance homes, changing what clients ask for when they walk through the door.

“A lot of the people would come through and say, oh, what colour are your curtains?” Saunders recalled. “Now the questions have changed. People ask where the windows came from. What’s the R value. Have you got a balanced ventilation system.”

That shift in client knowledge, he said, is the movement working.

What Goes Into a Super Home

For Saunders, the non-negotiables of a high-performance home are not about aesthetics. They are about the thermal envelope: the parts you cannot change once the house is built.

Insulated foundations. High-performance walls. Recessed windows positioned in line with the insulation layer to eliminate thermal bridging. A balanced ventilation system with heat recovery. Pre-wiring for solar.

“Rather than spending $2,000 on a stone benchtop, why not put $2,000 into extra insulation and change the benchtop later on?” he said. “We remodel kitchens every 10 years. You can’t change insulation.”

His DS Construction builds are thermally modelled by an architect before construction. The process accounts for shading, solar orientation, overheating risk and projected kilowatt hours per annum. A blower door test is conducted for airtightness.

The result is a home that maintains a consistent internal temperature of 18 to 21 degrees, the World Health Organization’s recommended range, without relying on constant heating. For many clients, that means no power bill in any meaningful sense.

“If you’re not spending that much money on power, what can you do with that saving? It could be going to your mortgage. Imagine how quickly your mortgage is coming down.”

EcoPanel and Prefabricated Construction

Alongside DS Construction, Saunders is involved in EcoPanel, a New Zealand prefabricated wall system that takes the performance principles of high-efficiency building and applies them at speed.

The panel uses LVL framing without nogs in the exterior walls, allowing insulation to run full height. A rigid air barrier of plywood sits on the outside, with a pro-clima wrap, battens and an airtight internal layer with a service cavity. Everything is assembled in a factory under controlled conditions.

The result is a weather-tight structure that can go from slab to roof-ready in under two weeks.

“We can potentially have a job depending on the design weather-tight in five days,” Saunders said.

That kind of speed is relevant to Australia right now. With the federal government’s target of 1.2 million homes by 2029 creating significant pressure on the delivery pipeline, prefabricated and modular construction is drawing attention across the industry.

Saunders is cautious about speed as the primary goal. Prefabrication works best when it carries performance standards, not just efficiency. But he acknowledges the opportunity.

“Minimising waste, accuracy is high, it goes up really, really quickly,” he said. “And once it’s in place, most people can’t tell it’s a panel system.”

New Zealand’s First Zero Carbon Development

Perhaps the most ambitious project Saunders discussed is currently underway in Christchurch: a four-home development designed around solar orientation, low carbon materials and zero embodied carbon.

The front house, Nga Whare Parara, is designed to become New Zealand’s first carbon zero Super Home, a project that has sequestered eight tonnes of carbon through material selection and construction methodology.

Steel and concrete use has been minimised across the development. Structural steel has been replaced with laminated glulam timber beams. The front home uses a suspended timber floor on piles. Cladding and flooring are predominantly timber.

“A lot of the houses could be low or zero carbon just by changing a few things,” Saunders said. “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. Watch the space.”

What Australian Builders Can Take From This

Australia and New Zealand share more than geography. They share a building industry culture, similar code structures, similar market pressures and a similar gap between what is permitted and what is possible.

Saunders sees it clearly. “We are very similar,” he said. “Only a bit more than a stone throw, but we’ve got so many similarities across the board.”

The lesson from his 30-plus year career is not that every builder needs to build passive houses. It is that the code is a floor, not a target. There is a large space between legal minimum and genuine performance, and the builders who operate in that space build a different kind of reputation.

“Be curious,” was his advice for builders wanting to future-proof their business. “Transition slowly. Learn from people who’ve got experience. The day you stop learning is the day you die.”

He also offered a saying that is worth sitting with.

“When you speak, you’re only repeating what you already know. If you listen, you might learn something new.”

For an industry that sometimes speaks loudly about standards without raising them, that is worth remembering.

THE GOOD BUILDER TAKE
Dan Saunders is a builder worth following. Not because his work is out of reach for most, but because his thinking is not.

The principles behind the Super Home Movement, building beyond code, thinking holistically, educating clients, sharing knowledge openly, are not exclusive to New Zealand.

Australia has the same code-minimum problem. The same health data. The same client awareness gap. And the same builders who are quietly doing better work and building better businesses because of it.

The question is not whether better is possible. It is whether enough builders are willing to draw their own line in the sand.

Listen to the full conversation with Dan Saunders on The Good Builder Podcast. Find out more about the Super Home Movement at superhome.co.nz and EcoPanel at ecopanel.co.nz

More Industry Profiles: The Recruiter Who Built Homes First: Luke Cotterell on What Builders Really Need in Their People

General information only. Not professional advice. Verify details with relevant authorities and seek independent guidance for your specific circumstances.

Author: TGB Editorial