Carl Lauren

Carl Lauren is in the zone. He is someone who spends his work hours and his volunteer hours committed to the same cause: increasing green buildings to reduce carbon footprints.

Lauren has two successful home construction businesses, and he serves on the board of directors of Built Green Canada, a national organization committed to working with builders interested in sustainability practices in the residential building sector.

He also spent two years spearheading the effort to spur the City of Kimberley to create an incentive program for green construction—a building permit fee rebate program for energy-efficient buildings.

“My ideology has always been starting from the grassroots and going up from there,” Lauren said.

How did you come to choose this line of work?

My dad was a general contractor so I grew up always exposed to construction and working on job sites. My dad's company did mostly bigger commercial projects and when they did residential it was cheap and ugly. I just always wondered why housing can’t be nice! I took construction management in school as well and worked on bigger projects in Vancouver. In the end, building people’s dreams is more rewarding. We look at every house like it’s a piece of art.

What is it about your work that has you excited to get out of bed in the morning?

I’m pretty passionate about evolution and being in residential construction. I really just want our company to not get trapped in the “what everyone else is doing” or “that’s just the way you do it.” I always want to find ways to make things better and make the world better. With what I do for a career, making the world better is building really energy-efficient houses (that are both practical and beautiful). I want to be part of the cure, not a part of the disease!

What’s your focus for 2016?

We are really focused on energy efficiency in our housing. Our goal for 2016 was to get our air changes (ac) per hour (hr)—a measure of how much a house leaks air and in turn wastes energy—to 1.5 ac/hr by the end of this year with our ultimate goal being under 1 ac/hr. However, we met that goal in 2015! So our goal now is to get our procedures in place to get 1 ac/hr. The industry standard is 4.2 ac/hr, so getting under 1 is a real challenge and feat.

Our other goal is to find ways to make residential housing more affordable. It’s ridiculous how housing costs just keep going up and we keep paying it. Obviously with some of our larger custom homes, it is hard to keep the price down, but there is a disconnect in our area, province and nationwide with the cost of housing. We will be aggressively trying to find products and procedures to bring more affordable new housing to the Kootenays.

Why did you decide to become an entrepreneur in the Kootenays?

I am originally from Williams Lake, which is a fairly small town. Living in Vancouver for a while, I missed the small town people and ways of life. On top of it, I love the mountains and the four seasons. The Kootenays just seemed to have all of that as well as providing growth potential. It’s a beautiful area—obviously I am partial to Kimberley—but the whole area is almost perfect. The amount of outdoor activities you can do are endless and on top of it, you have some of these places to yourself when you are out there. It’s also so close to so many other places: Vancouver and Calgary are just a short flight away and from there you can go anywhere. Washington, Idaho and Montana are (just a few) hours away. To top it off, there are iconic places like Waterton Lakes and Glacier national parks so close. We are lucky to have all of these amenities at our doorstep.