Sustainable by Design

Our award-winning homes celebrate form, function, and a focus on resource efficiency.

For many of our buyers, a dream home is comprised not just of stunning living spaces and beautiful fixtures and finishes but incorporates smart, sustainable materials and design as well. At Toll Brothers, we are distinguished by the flexibility and choice we offer customers to personalize their homes. Home buyers can select from structural options to suit their specific floor plan needs, and in our Design Studios, they can personalize the interior of their new home with a wide variety of high-quality cabinetry, flooring, fixtures, and other products and materials. As part of the Toll Brothers personalization offering, we include many energy-efficient and sustainable product options. And as we seek to meet our customers' increasing expectations for more sustainable products and services, we continue to work in partnership with our suppliers and vendors such as Kohler, Whirlpool, and Carrier/Bryant to be an environmental educator for our employees and home buyers as we strive to offer not only the best products, but products that are environmentally conscious, provide energy savings, and a long-lasting value.

When it comes to energy efficiency, the benefits of a new construction home over an older home cannot be overstated, and as the nation's leading builder of new construction luxury homes, we are proud to play a major part in delivering on that promise. According to the most recent residential energy consumption survey from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, homes built between 2010 and 2015 used, on average, almost 30% less energy per square foot than the average for all homes built prior to 2010. These efficiency gains are a result of many factors, including improvements in temperature control through reduced leakage of expensive conditioned air and increased R-Values through the use of higher quality insulation and installation techniques, the incorporation of energy-efficient appliances and HVAC equipment, and other improvements stemming from compliance with more modern and stringent building codes.

The Home Energy Rating System, also known as the HERS index, is a nationally recognized system used to determine and verify a home's energy performance. Developed by the Residential Energy Services Network and introduced in 2006, the HERS Index is the industry standard by which a home's energy efficiency is measured. Government agencies such as the Department of Energy (DOE), the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recognize the HERS Index as an official verification of energy performance. While in California, a different scoring system is used, called the Energy Design Rating, also known as an EDR Score, at Toll Brothers we have the ability to run any California project energy modeling in a separate software to produce a HERS Score.

The HERS Index Score informs a buyer about how energy efficient a house is. The lower the score, the more energy-efficient the home. A standard Toll Brothers project in California can achieve an average HERS Score of 25 in comparison to 59, which is the average score of all HERS-rated homes in the U.S. according to Residential Energy Services Network (RESNET).

Materials Matter

At Toll Brothers communities that are supported by TIS, our in-house design and manufacturing plants, our standard process includes the use of engineered wall panels using state-of-the-art panelization technology. Panelization reduces waste and natural resource consumption, increases quality of materials and manufacturing, improves product consistency, and reduces onsite labor costs and build times. Plus, our optimized business processes enable our design/engineering, manufacturing, and construction teams to improve design efficiencies, reduce raw material waste and environmental pollution, optimize overall construction cycle times, and minimize energy usage.