PAPIK Group is hosting an open masterclass in Santa Maria de Palautordera to guide future self-builders on how to make a highly energy-efficient passive house a reality.
Few decisions carry as much weight as building your own home. Timelines, procedures, costs and technical options often arrive in a disordered way and without a reliable point of reference. To answer these questions directly, PAPIK Group is hosting a free masterclass in Santa Maria de Palautordera on how to build a sustainable, highly energy-efficient home.
The session will take place on Friday 13 September at 12h and is aimed at people who are considering building a house and want to understand the full process at first hand. Places are limited, registration is free, and a place must be reserved in advance on the company's website.
The class will answer some of the most common questions that arise when planning a build: what the stages are, which timelines to anticipate, which procedures are involved and what costs each phase entails. From there, the session examines how to build homes capable of reducing energy costs to near zero, with a lower environmental impact thanks to the use of sustainable materials.
A significant part of the day is devoted to one of the sector's most profound shifts in recent years: timber as a structural material. Its expansion has filled the landscape with wooden houses across the country, and the session explains how this material has established itself as a new standard in residential construction.
The masterclass brings together three leading professionals in the construction of passive, sustainable and bioclimatic homes. Papik Fisas, manager of the construction company, brings more than fifteen years of experience building timber homes and Eskimohaus houses certified to the Passivhaus standard, the most demanding on the market. Eva Jordan, head of the Arquitir architecture practice, is a Passivhaus specialist. Xavier Sicart, a quantity surveyor, has extensive experience in building self-promoted single-family homes.
Together they can guide future self-builders on how to design, finance, size, lay foundations and build their future sustainable home, with sound technical criteria and without commercial oversimplification.
The session includes a visit to an Eskimohaus home, offering a first-hand view of what a sustainable timber house looks like in operation. During the visit, attendees can inspect the cross-ventilation system with heat recovery and the way a passive house is climate-controlled, two of the elements that explain its energy performance and that are often hard to grasp from drawings alone. For anyone wishing to explore this approach further, the wood revolution makes for useful complementary reading.
The event is free, but places are limited and prior registration on the PAPIK Group website is required. Booking a place in advance is the way to secure attendance at a session designed to resolve, with rigour, the real questions of those who want to build.
Building a passive house does not begin on site, but in understanding the process. A session like this exists precisely so that decisions are made with information rather than intuition.