Crafted for Craftsmanship

Zero-energy craft, decade-long digital care

Birdsmouth Design Build has been Cascade’s client since 2015, when founder Josh Salinger asked for a website that could express his company’s radical belief that homes should fight climate change, not fuel it. Today, that message still greets visitors: Birdsmouth is a “recognized leader in high-performance building and design,” creating zero-energy projects that are “healthier, more comfortable, and more resilient than the industry standard.”

From day one, the site had two jobs: showcase striking Passive House projects and translate building science into plain-English benefits. We launched an image-driven Evergreen build in autumn 2015, then treated it like a living structure—refinishing, reinforcing, and re-insulating rather than tearing it down. Over the years, we’ve streamlined navigation, replaced brittle plugins with lighter custom components, compressed photography, and tuned Core Web Vitals so pages still open in less than two seconds on mobile.

One of our biggest contributions has been storytelling. Birdsmouth’s design-build process is rigorous: clients move through programming interviews, site analysis, schematic design, iterative cost studies, and value engineering before a single nail is driven. We turned that multi-phase journey into a clear narrative online, helping homeowners understand why budget checkpoints come early, how schematic cost studies prevent sticker shock, and what “value engineering” really means. The result is fewer surprises in the field and more qualified leads in the inbox.

A decade on, the relationship is equal parts caretaker and coach. We monitor uptime, push security patches, review analytics, and suggest incremental UX tweaks—freeing the Birdsmouth team to concentrate on the next zero-energy home, ADU, or deep-energy retrofit. The site remains their digital front door: fast, findable, and as thoughtfully built as the projects it celebrates.