Cordero Architects is a veteran-owned modern infill practice operating on a single technical premise: that the most important drawing in any house we produce is the energy model, not the elevation. I spent eleven years in the Navy Civil Engineer Corps before I took the licensure exam, and I came out of that experience with a hard intolerance for buildings that fail their operators after handoff. A house is a system. We design it as a system.
Every house we draw is modelled in three concurrent ways: a thermal envelope simulation with target heating and cooling loads, a moisture-and-air-barrier section drawn before any elevation is committed, and a 30-year operating-cost projection that lives in the cost-summary document the owner sees. We will not draw a window we cannot prove out thermally. We will not specify an insulation assembly that the trades on the block cannot install with the tools they own. Theoretical high-performance is not performance.
Our houses are visually quiet. We use a flat-faced lap siding, an exposed eave, and a single roof plane wherever the budget allows it. The aesthetic argument is downstream of the energy argument: shed roofs and minimal eaves give us the simplest possible air barrier geometry, which is what makes the heating bills predictable. The modern look is a side effect, not a preference.
“The most important drawing in any house is the energy model, not the elevation.”
We work principally with first-time and second-time individual homeowners who have decided that their forever budget — the sum of mortgage, utilities, maintenance, and replacement over thirty years — matters more than their move-in budget. That client is rarer than they should be, and we are proud to be the studio they find.
What we deliver to that client, contractually, is the thirty-year operating-cost projection alongside the drawing set. It is two pages, signed, and it lists the modelled annual heating cost, cooling cost, water-heating cost, expected appliance replacements, expected envelope-maintenance interventions, and the cost of a roof replacement in year twenty-five. We have made mistakes in that document over the years — most of them small, all of them publishable. The discipline of writing the operating-cost projection down where the owner can hold us to it is, in our view, the single most important argument for engaging an architect rather than buying a builder-grade stock plan. When the modelled bill and the measured first-year bill agree within ten per cent — which has happened on all seven of our metered houses — the owner stops describing the architect as a luxury and starts describing the architect as the engineer of their monthly budget.