‘I always wanted to build better than the standard.’
That's Robert Whitehouse, founder of Energy Efficient Homes,
and it's been his approach for more than 40 years.
Robert has spent his career finding ways to deliver more without compromising quality, from a successful manufacturing business in England to carpentry, construction management, award-winning homes, and high-performance building in New Zealand.
His question has always been the same:
How do you deliver the best possible home at a price more people can afford?
And it’s still how we work today.
A builder who never accepted
‘that’s just how it’s done’
At 27, Robert started his first business in England manufacturing and selling kitchens, bedrooms, and home offices. He ran it for 14 years before selling and moving to New Zealand in 1999.
His working class parents had taught him the value of money, but not to confuse value with cutting corners. Robert carried that with him into his first businesses, and eventually into building.
He began working as a carpenter and quickly saw that the quality of housing construction here as well as the Building Code itself was well behind global standards. He moved into construction management, and it wasn’t long before he found something else he thought could be done better: foundations.
So he designed his own boxing system and started Adjustable Boxing in 2004, at a time there were no other companies specialising in foundations.
That instinct has stayed with him ever since. When he sees a problem, he doesn’t simply ask how everyone else is solving it. He asks whether there’s a better way.
Better houses
need better systems
By 2009, Robert was building houses with his own teams – houses that went on to win Master Builders House of the Year awards, including Silver, Gold, and two Gold Reserves.
Then Christchurch was hit by two major earthquakes. Robert had to rethink what a better building system needed to do.
He had already built two houses using structural insulated panels (SIPs). SIPs are rigid, and in an earthquake, rigid cracks. Once a panel cracks and moisture gets in, you’re not fixing a surface; you’re repairing part of the house’s structure.
So he went looking for a system that would hold up better in a quake, deliver the performance he was after, and cost less to build. That became the system behind Energy Efficient Homes.
Better buildings
for everyone
By 2010, Robert had turned his attention to energy efficient building. Under the Whitehouse Builders trade name, he developed the skills, systems, and supplier relationships to make energy efficiency part of the design, rather than something ‘added on’.
He studied Passive House principles, attended international conferences, and built relationships with people at the forefront of high-performance building, including Lothar Moll of Pro Clima and Wolfgang Feist of Passive House. In 2015, he became a certified Passive House tradesperson.
In 2024, he built a Passive House Premium in Christchurch, the most demanding level of Passive House certification.
But he never lost sight of what he believed about value. Passive House was out of reach for most people, but a warm, healthy, energy efficient home shouldn’t be a luxury item.
That became the mission behind Energy Efficient Homes: to deliver Passive House-style performance at a price Kiwis can actually afford.
One team
every step of the way
Today, Robert builds whatever his clients want. He’s not going to tell you there’s only one right answer. What he will do is educate you.
That’s possible because the whole team stays in house, including our own qualified architectural team and designers. With the architect, builder, and quantity surveyor in one room, every decision gets checked against every other decision.
Keeping the team in house isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about keeping the people responsible for your home accountable to each other, and to you.
With everyone working together to keep the budget on track, costs don’t spiral, problems are spotted early, and the money goes toward what actually matters in your life in that home.
Four decades on
still finding a better way
Robert’s approach has never really changed: find something good, make it available, and don’t charge more than you have to.
It’s the same instinct that took him from manufacturing kitchens, to inventing a foundation system, to building Passive House performance into affordable homes.
These days, he’s not the only one applying it. His son, Daniel Whitehouse, is our quantity surveyor, watching every dollar on your build.
When Robert looks back over his four decades in business, it was never just about giving his customers value for money. It was also about the people who trusted him to deliver it.
‘When a client signs a contract with us, they’re putting their trust in us. They’re trusting us with the biggest investment they’ll ever make.’
– Robert Whitehouse
What keeps him up at night is simple. ‘Making sure we don’t let people down.’