At Bensonwood, we believe a truly well-built home should do more than shelter you. It should work for you. For Colin and Katie of Southern Maine, that belief became a reality the moment they moved into their Värm home. And now, thanks to CNN Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir, their story is reaching a national audience.
Bill Weir recently visited our production facility in Keene, NH, then traveled to Southern Maine to tour the Värm firsthand. The feature captured not just the craftsmanship behind our prefabricated systems, but the remarkable way one family transformed how they live, going completely off the grid without sacrificing a single modern comfort.
Two Years of House-Hunting, and Then a Better Idea
Like so many buyers in today’s market, Colin and Katie didn’t start out with the plan to build. For nearly two years, they scoured Maine’s housing market, putting in offers on a half-dozen homes, often well over asking, only to be outbid again and again by cash buyers.
“The housing stock was nonexistent, to say the least,” Colin told CNN.
Exhausted by the search, they made a different call: build something better. They chose the Värm platform from our Unity collection, and it changed everything.
Meet the Värm: Our Most Efficient Path to a High-Performance Home
The Värm, Swedish for “warm,” is our most cost-efficient home platform per square foot. It’s designed for people who want exceptional energy performance, smart use of space, and long-term value without an open-ended custom build process. It blends Scandinavian simplicity with the warmth of a modern farmhouse, engineered from the ground up to perform.
Its two-story layout is purposeful. By placing more living space over the same roof and foundation, which are the most expensive elements of any build, the Värm maximizes square footage relative to cost. The result feels generous and architecturally substantial, without the price tag typically associated with custom design. Every Värm is also built using our Open-Built® system, ensuring the structure, mechanical systems, and finishes work together seamlessly for higher quality today and easier upgrades tomorrow.
Why the Värm Was the Right Foundation for Off-Grid Living
Colin is an engineer on an offshore oil drilling ship in the Gulf of Mexico, someone who knows energy intimately. When he decided to build a home that ran entirely without the grid, he needed a shell that could make that vision real.
At Bensonwood, every high-performance home starts with the envelope. Before any conversation about solar arrays or battery storage, we focus on building a super-insulated, airtight shell that dramatically reduces how much energy the home needs in the first place. When your home doesn’t leak heat, a modest solar array is more than enough to power your life. For Colin and Katie, that means a home heated and cooled by heat pumps, an induction range in the kitchen, and even in the depths of a Maine winter, the whole house is kept comfortable by a single small wood stove.
The Numbers Tell the Story
Colin’s engineering background meant he could install his own rooftop solar and electrical systems, an impressive part of his DIY efforts that saved him hundreds of thousands of dollars. All in, he spent around $500,000, an estimated $200,000 less than expected, and took advantage of federal solar tax credits that saved him more than $10,000 on his panels alone.
The ongoing savings are equally striking. Last winter, he burned just 30 gallons of diesel as a battery backup during stretches of low sun. This is a fraction of the hundreds of gallons of heating oil a typical Maine homeowner burns each season. For Colin and Katie, the monthly bills come down to internet and property taxes. That’s it.
A Convert in Every Sense of the Word
Katie was initially skeptical of her husband’s off-grid ambitions. Then a severe storm knocked out the neighbors’ power, and their lights stayed on.
“I would never go back,” she told CNN. “When I tell co-workers or neighbors that we live off-grid and they see the house, they’re always like, ‘Whoa, this isn’t what I was expecting!’ It’s really fun surprising people; I live a totally normal life.”
That reaction captures something we hear often from our homeowners. People expect “prefab” to mean compromise. The Värm is proof it doesn’t have to.
Built Different: What Sets the Värm Apart
Our homes are built to such a high standard of airtightness that net-zero performance is often a given when renewable energy enters the picture, and in many cases, our homes produce more energy than they consume. A useful benchmark: the Passive House standard requires an airtightness of 0.60 ACH (air changes per hour) as measured by a blower door test. Our homes regularly come in at 0.3 or 0.4, and rather than accept that as good enough, our team continues to push for better with every build.
That commitment to the envelope shows up in everyday life through quieter interiors, consistent temperatures, better air quality, and often no fuel bills at all. The Värm’s airtight shell, combined with heat pumps and continuous air exchange systems, keeps fresh air circulating and mold at bay year-round.
Like all of our designs, the Värm is also genuinely Zero Net Energy-ready, with ample roof surface planned for photovoltaics from day one. And because our homes are assembled inside our climate-controlled Keene, NH facility, they can be dried in on site within days of delivery, a process that eliminates weather delays and protects every material from the start.
The Goodsons’ story is a glimpse of what’s possible when smart design meets skilled craft and real building science. It’s not about living with less. It’s about living better.
