“Royal Rebirth,” a two-page spread in the May/June 2026 issue of Green Builder Magazine, tells how a fire-damaged 1901 Victorian came back as a Zero Energy Ready Home.
Green Builder Magazine has featured the Queen of Zero in the FIRE section of its May/June 2026 issue. The piece captures something we’ve said since the day we first walked the site: preservation and performance are not opposing forces.
From ashes to all-electric
A 2020 fire damaged the 1901 Queen Anne Victorian in Hyattsville, Maryland beyond repair. The owner, a longtime Maryland resident with a deep commitment to historic preservation, never considered replacing it with something contemporary. The goal was to bring back the original in form and appearance, so the house would still belong to the streetscape it had anchored for a century.
But rebuilding from the foundation up created a rare opening. If the structure was coming back anyway, why not bring it back to a standard the 1901 version could never have reached?
What’s underneath the painted lady
Completed in November 2024, the Queen of Zero has been certified Zero Energy Ready Home by the U.S. Department of Energy featuring:
- Structural insulated panel shell, advanced air sealing, beyond-code insulation
- Tesla solar shingles with Powerwall backup and a SPAN smart electric panel
- High-efficiency heat pump HVAC and water heating
- Dual-pane windows that outperform their predecessors while matching the original design
- Low- and no-VOC paints, efficient lighting and appliances
The results: 1.6 ACH50 and a HERS score of 15 on a house with seven different roof pitches, multiple bay windows, dormers, and a turret. Anyone who has chased air sealing on a complex envelope knows what that geometry costs you. It took thirteen months and a genuinely collaborative team: Michael Romero of Romero Architects on design, DAKS Builders as project builder, and Symbi Homes directing sustainability.
Proof is in the performance
At 4,600 square feet across three stories, with six bedrooms and five bathrooms, this is a large house and some housing experts argue a home this size can’t reasonably be held up as a green exemplar.
It’s a fair point. Our answer is that decarbonizing the housing stock isn’t a single road; it requires many routes converging. The goal is a world where high-performance construction is simply how building gets done, whether the project is a luxury mansion or a group of affordable townhomes. Every project that trains a crew or gives a subcontractor their first solar shingle roof moves the baseline.
The homeowner averages about $40 in utility costs per month, a tiny fraction of what smaller homes in the neighborhood are consuming. The Queen of Zero exists to demonstrate that high-performance homes need not come in square boxes.
“Royal Rebirth” appears on pages 40–41 of the May/June 2026 issue of Green Builder Magazine. Photography by Unik Creative Studio. Curious what a deep energy retrofit could look like for your home? Get in touch.
