Team EcoNest

Our professional team of builders, architects, technicians, building biologists, teachers, and healthful living practitioners bring decades of experience to the EcoNest Company. We believe that all people have the right to live in healthy, high quality and resource efficient homes. We build living sanctuaries, not just houses.

Robert Laporte

Robert is the founder of the EcoNest Company and the Natural House Building Center. He is the author of "Mooseprints", and co-author of "EcoNest". Robert is a leading expert in earth, straw and timberframe structures. He has been designing and building natural homes for the past 25 years in Canada and the US. He has researched natural building extensively in Europe and has been a major influence in the introduction of light clay/straw building to North America. Robert and the EcoNest Team have also taught EcoNest building throughout Scandinavia.

Email Robert at robert@econest.com

Paula Baker-Laporte

Hailed by Natural Home Magazine in 2005 as one of the top 10 green architects in the US, Paula leads the EcoNest design team. Paula is the primary author of "Prescriptions for a Healthy House", is co-author of "EcoNest" and is a contributing author to "A People's Ecology".

Paula graduated from the University of Toronto School of Architecture in 1978 and moved to Santa Fe, NM in 1981 where she currently lives with her husband Robert Laporte and daughter Sarah. Paula has been designing fine custom homes in Santa Fe since 1986. She is an architect, a certified Bau-biologist (Building Biologist), and a co-founder of the Healthy Housing Coalition.

Paula and the EcoNest design team specialize in non-toxic and sustainable design. "We create attractive home and workplaces which are conceived with an ecological mindfulness and endowed with health enhancing qualities. Your ideas, your budget, and your dreams are the palette around which our team creates with you." She lectures, writes extensively and travels throughout the US and Canada consulting about healthy building.

Email Paula at paula@econest.com

Dave Madden

Dave is a registered architect with over 17 years experience in residential design and construction. He graduated from Temple University in 1986 and moved to New Mexico in 1997 with his wife Kristin and son Karl. Dave's experience in design and construction documentation range from renovations of 200 year-old New England farm houses to high-end custom homes on the Gimbel Estate in Greenwich, Connecticut to a variety of size and style homes in the greater Albuquerque area of New Mexico. He has also had experience as a construction supervisor, estimator and designer for a New Mexico-based custom home builder.

This experience gives Dave the unique ability to communicate a client's desires through design and into presentation drawings and construction documents that clearly and concisely convey those ideas to the EcoNest building team. As a life long proponent of environmental stewardship, Dave is committed to the firm's goals of quality and excellence in the design and construction of healthy environments.

Steve Lawrence

Steve has worked with the EcoNest Company since 1999 as a timber framer, carpenter, and work shop instructor.

Besides the satisfaction of working with simple natural materials on beautiful projects, Steve enjoys the sense of community and empowerment generated on workshop projects.

Prior to picking up a chisel and mallet, he worked for 20 years in the field of outdoor education for the National Outdoor Leadership School and other outdoor education programs in North America and East Africa.

He is an enthusiastic teacher and learner. Steve and his daughter Makena live in Santa Fe.

Joyce Lathrop

Joyce came to EcoNest to "do the books" and found she has many things in common with the EcoNest team, particularly energy efficient homes. An accountant, she manages all the financial operations for EcoNest as well as handling the registration for seminars and workshops.

Her background includes working in high-tech manufacturing firms as well as being a controller for a large land development and homebuilding company with a division in Santa Fe. She and her husband live in Santa Fe where 100% of their electric needs are met with a photovoltaic, grid-tied solar system.

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