The Best Homes in the Triangle Are on Display This Weekend
Tour ambitious, green-certified homes during the 2025 High Performance Home Tour
It’s spring in North Carolina. The air smells like honeysuckle. Your calendar’s not that full. And the best homes being built in the Triangle are open for touring, free, this weekend.
The High Performance Home Tour runs Saturday and Sunday, April 26–27, from noon to 5 pm. It’s self-guided, zero pressure, and if you care about building betterconsistently one of the most energizing events of the year .
These homes aren’t just pretty renderings or online listings. They’re real, built, certified, and filled with details that make a difference: lower energy bills, healthier air, longer-lasting materials, smarter systems. They are built by Builders who enjoy showing off what’s possible.
Spotlight: Newphire Building Corp
Newphire is quietly doing some of the most technically advanced and beautifully resolved residential work in the state. This year, they’re showing off multiple homes in the Array community in Orange County, including a near-net-zero stunner at 4621 Array Drive.
Here’s what to look for:
Solar + Battery + Ventilation: This home includes a 12.15 kW solar array, 18.5 kW battery backup, and a Renewaire EV 200 energy recovery ventilator—meaning you’re not just generating clean energy, you’re keeping fresh air moving efficiently throughout the home.
Storm-Smart Design: It includes a reinforced pantry shelter with a storm door and rails, giving homeowners peace of mind during extreme weather events.
Super Sealed: Triple-pane windows, 1 ACH @ 50 Pa, and a variable-speed 20 SEER heat pump make this home airtight and quiet inside.
Another Newphire home at 2461 Neville Road leans into passive solar design, with a hydronic radiant heat slab, overhangs and thermal mass, and low-maintenance natural finishes. Such homes are clearly built to endure.
Spotlight: BuildSense – Glendale Heights
The Bull City’s own BuildSense has a home on tour at 2527 Glendale Avenue in Durham that checks multiple green building boxes—and it’s beautiful to boot.
Key features:
Solar-First Orientation: The home is carefully oriented to capture winter sun and block summer heat, with tight overhangs and high-performance windows.
HERS Score of 49: That’s half the energy use of a code-built home, verified by third-party certification.
Thermal Bridge-Free Framing: Advanced exterior wall techniques dramatically reduce energy loss, and the home includes spray foam in key areas to maintain airtightness.
This isn’t a showpiece for a glossy magazine—it’s a real, livable, durable, owner-occupied home. And it’s open for you to walk through this weekend.
There are more homes on the tour—more styles, more systems, more ideas—but these two builders alone are reason enough to hit the road.
This tour should be a regional holiday. In my perfect world, it becomes a weekend-long celebration of ambition: food trucks, block parties, buses between homes, music on front lawns. But even as it stands, it’s one of the best things happening in our local housing ecosystem.
It should be in the 60s and 70s. Let’s hope the rain holds off!
📍 Tour maps and info: highperformancehometour.org
