Slow Home was launched in fall 2006 from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Our goal is simple: to help people learn about the principles of good residential design and how to apply them in a variety of real world situations. We provide the basic knowledge and skills necessary for people to become more informed residential consumers and empower them to make smarter choices about where and how they live.

Slow Home was founded by Canadian architect John Brown and its philosophy emerges out of his lifelong commitment to bringing good design to real life. As a Professor of Architecture in the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Environmental Design he has been researching critical alternatives to the North American residential mass production industry for over twenty years. In 1998 he put his research into practice and augmented his architectural registration with both a construction contractor’s license and real estate broker’s license. The result was housebrand, a radically redefined architecture practice he cofounded with partners Matthew North and Carina van Olm.

Housebrand

housebrand integrates architecture, interior design, construction, real estate brokerage, and product retailing into a vertically integrated process that offers a one stop, simple, and cost effective process for renovating or building new in existing residential neighborhoods. housebrand combines a strong design philosophy with an integrated model of production that makes the option of a well designed, environmentally sensitive, and economically reasonable home as readily achievable for the average homeowner as the mass produced status quo alternative. housebrand received the 2003 Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Award of Excellence for Innovation. In giving the award the jury commented that “through rigorous research and analysis, (John Brown) has developed and exploited an untapped market niche. His firm’s entrepreneurial methodology and branding of service and product could be effectively applied as a model for other communities, practices and businesses.”

Slow Food

The success of this firm confirmed Mr. Brown’s research findings into the North American public’s desire for real alternatives to the standardized world of cookie cutter suburban sprawl. When his sister, a Calgary chef, introduced him to slow food in 2005, he saw the connection between its criticism of fast food and his research into “too fast” suburban housing. “When I started to tell people that a new cookie cutter suburban home was like a supersized hamburger and fries, I quickly discovered that they could connect with the criticisms of suburban sprawl much more directly,” Mr. Brown says.

He recognized that the idea of slow home could also effectively describe the way that he and a number of his architectural colleagues around the world had been pursuing residential design. “Slow food is about valuing quality instead of quantity. It is about thinking more carefully about where your ingredients come from and how you prepare them. Many architects approach residential design in much the same way; valuing the quality of space over size and the number of bathrooms. They take site and materials into careful account and then work with their client to tailor the design to their specific needs.”

Like slow food, Mr. Brown also saw the potential for a slow home philosophy to extend beyond the boundaries of the professional designer to become an educational resource that the average person could use to create a more thoughtful, environmentally sustainable and economically responsible way of life. He observes that, “in the past 10 years we have all become much more aware about how our food choices affect our health, our community and the well being of the planet. By making the connection with slow food, we can build on that understanding to raise awareness about how we can make better choices about how and where we live.”

The Slow Home website capitalizes on Mr. Brown’s expertise as a respected design educator, his extensive research into global residential design practice, and his successful professional experience to become an information resource that empowers homeowners to step outside of the too fast residential industry of cookie cutter homebuilders, realtors, and developers. “The fifty year old model of building more and more cookie cutter homes further and further out of the city just isn’t working any more. This is a time for the public, and the residential industry that serves them, to re-think the nature of the 21st Century home.”

This mission has taken on new urgency with the recent upheavals in the economy and the collapse of the American residential industry. “The credit crisis and climate change are rewriting the rules of residential real estate,” Mr. Brown says, “and there will be significant shifts in the way the housing market will function in the future. Gone are the days when the answer to every problem is simply moving into a bigger house.  Living well in the future is going to mean making smarter, more consistent, and responsible decisions about our homes”.

Slow Home Design School

To help people prepare for this challenge Slow Home launched its web based Design School in spring 2009.  By combining the tenets of demonstration cooking television with the low production cost of web based video, Slow Home is able to bring real design studio education to everyone interested in making smarter, more consistent choices about their home.

According to Mr. Brown, “Learning about design is best done in an interactive studio environment. In fact, watching an expert demonstrate a particular principle or skill as you work on it yourself is a time honored tradition in architectural education. To facilitate this experience, our design school takes its inspiration from demonstration cooking television. In the same way that Julia Child and others created broadcast versions of culinary school to demonstrate the basic skills and techniques of being a chef, we have created a web based platform to demonstrate the basic skills and techniques of being a residential architect”.

Although current economic circumstances prevent most people from making any dramatic changes at the moment, this situation is going to change and Mr. Brown argues that we need to get prepared.  ”Now is an ideal time to learn about the principles of good residential design so that you are ready to act when things do improve. For the first time in several generations we don’t have to accept the status quo as the only alternative for where and how we live. Imagine how great our world could be if it could be different. That is both the challenge and the promise we face.”