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Monday 9am - 5pm Tuesday 9am - 5pm Wednesday 9am - 5pm Thursday 9am - 5pm Friday 9am - 5pm

New Frameworks Natural Design/Build

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United States
Burlington, VT
New Frameworks Natural Design/Build

Natural Building worker-owned cooperative based in Vermont! Nature-inspired art made functional, building a regenerative world project by project.

New Frameworks is a Vermont-based multi-racial, queer, trans, and women-owned cooperative dedicated to delivering natural, high-performance structures using sustainable, locally sourced materials and socially responsible practices.

05/28/2026

The construction industry has spent decades extracting — from the land, from workers, from homeowners and occupants. We’re not interested in that framework.

Here are the things that surprise people the most about our Casitas:

1. Our Casitas are pre-designed to cut the cost & time of getting into a high-performance, natural home, but they’re not designed to be one-size-fits-all. They’re customizable to fit your needs, your square footage, your local codes. And you get the savings of a pre-designed starting point with the option to customize it into something that fits you and your story.

2. A majority of our prefab panel kits have been installed by builders who were not us - because these kits were designed for ease of installation and accessibility for small and inexperienced teams in the age of a skilled labor shortage. No prior natural building experience, nor experience with SIPs is required. Just some familiarity or practice with high performance building practices, and our kit & installation instructions, along with 10 hours of complimentary virtual consultation services provided with each kit take care of the rest!

3. Each Casita is built with a mix of straw- and .insulatebetter - structural insulated panels, that, when paired with other low-carbon building materials like helical piers, store between 1,000-4,500kg of carbon emissions. In other words, each one of these Casitas helps to heal the planet!

Visit the LINK IN BIO to request a Casita quote, view our available models and floor plans, and learn more about our national impact with the .collaborative.

05/21/2026

Seeing our straw panels help to create a gorgeous home for people is always the best feeling… like this light-filled, cozy timber frame home on Mount Desert Island in Maine, designed by architect Meredith Randolph of Four Winds Design and built by Tobin Peacock of Peacock Builders. Meredith reached out early in the design process to feature our straw panels in the project, as the panels pair perfectly with a timberframe. We worked with her to integrate the client’s desire for window layout and panel design adjustments. Tobin and his crew received and installed the panels quite seamlessly into the project with very little input needed from us. We collaborated with .build & to shop-apply lime plaster in our fabrication shop, and then Liz & crew handled the on-site plaster finishing. All in all a satisfying collaboration and we hope to do many more with this wonderful team of architect, builder, & plasterers ✍🏼🔨⚒️🌾🌳🛘🫶🏼

05/15/2026

One of our latest units, a customized Árbol 1200, looking beautiful in the afternoon sun as captured by .

Some highlights of this unit:

1. This prefabricated Casita stored roughly -3,084 kg CO₂e, the carbon-storing equivalent to the environmental impact of planting 142 fully grown trees or removing 31 CO₂ - emitting vehicles from the road over the course of one year. 🌱🌎And even better, it was built with 0 cement (cement is the LARGEST source of carbon emissions in the construction industry - making up about 40% of their total emissions! ❌🙅‍♀️)

2. Built with natural, low carbon materials like New Frameworks (that’s us!) and now, the .collaborative straw and .insulatebetter structural insulated panels (SIPs), locally grown and milled hemlock structural elements and pine finishes, low-carbon and 0-VOC stains () , sealants (), plasters (.plaster) and paints (), this unit is as healthy for its inhabitants as it is the environment!

3. While this prefabricated Casita was customized from our standard version, this 1200SF 3BR, 2BA unit can be fabricated in about 6-weeks time and installed in under 2 months (often, faster!)

4. With our growing Seed Collaborative, this unit can be purchased and fabricated from not only our facility in Essex Junction, VT, but also any of our current and past Seed Program participants, currently .design, , , , , , and soon .build , , ,

We currently have fabrication and delivery openings in SUMMER 2026 (yes, this summer!) from a majority of our manufacturers. 🗓️

Join our grassroots MOVEMENT where homeowners and homebuilders can play a part in reversing climate change, while reaping the benefits of healthy, non-toxic living. Visit our LINK IN BIO to request a quote for a prefabricated Casita!

05/01/2026

Feliz Día de Los Trabajadores! Happy May Day! (Español abajo)

We join the working peoples of the world in saying: 1. Tax the rich 2. No ICE. No war. 3. Hands off our vote

New Frameworks is celebrating May Day today by working together at our worker owned cooperative creating climate-healing homes for our communities - and then joining Migrant Justice in the rally and picket at Hannaford grocery, march to the ICE administrative building, and peoples’ festival.

We are proud to stand in solidarity with these demands and the organizations leading this work in our communities. And with the cooperative sector who joins this mobilization today Friday May 1.

Nos unimos a los trabajadores de todo el mundo para decir: 1. Gravar a los ricos. 2. No al ICE. No a la guerra. 3. No toquen nuestro voto.

New Frameworks celebra hoy el Primero de Mayo trabajando juntos en nuestra cooperativa de propiedad de los trabajadores para crear viviendas respetuosas con el clima para nuestras comunidades, y luego uniéndonos a Migrant Justice en la concentración y el piquete frente al supermercado Hannaford, la marcha hacia el edificio administrativo del ICE y el festival comunitario.

Estamos orgullosos de solidarizarnos con estas reivindicaciones y con las organizaciones que lideran esta labor en nuestras comunidades. Y con el sector cooperativo que se une a esta movilización hoy, viernes 1 de mayo.

04/11/2026

A truly lovely project with lovely humans that we are grateful to have been a part of:

02/25/2026

Introducing our newest Casita: the Toro 900!! 🎉One-floor living with 2 bedrooms and 2 baths, the Toro is both solid on the earth and opens to light and flow in the living spaces above. Helpful for those looking for aging in place, modern living, and inter-generational and/or community housing options, the Toro 900 is not just another pretty face. Always made with earth-friendly and healthy materials, such as our (organic) straw structural insulated panels (S-SIPs), regional wood-based insulation from .insulatebetter, and suggested design finishes, our version of new construction makes the world a better place. We house our communities by drawing down more carbon with the building materials used than we emit - reversing climate heating with each build. Our team is excited to talk with you if you see yourself or a loved one or community member in one of these. Reach out to us - contact info in our bio. Talk soon and much 🌾❤️.

02/24/2026

Progress on our Cabañita Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) in Winooski,VT. This unit will be a offered as rental by the property owners, bringing much-needed healthy, comfortable housing to an area with immense housing shortage. The Casitas move both people and planet forward by tackling the housing and climate crises together. We make climate-reparative, healthy, local, and high-performance housing easy to say “yes” to with pre-designed kit homes and a pre-fabricated panelized system. Builds are faster, more predictable, and less intensive on project sites. This helps to make carbon-drawdown and healthy-materials buildings the new normal for how we house our people. We are building a movement with many others .design .build .tech .craft and more… Get into it! Join us 🌾🌾🌾🏡🏡🏡🔨🪚

02/09/2026

Today we’re featuring a beautiful time/lapse reveal image of our straw panels, created by our friends & collaborators at , using stunning images from , of a project we worked on together on in Idaho. The images really tell their own story: of clean, dry, organic straw becoming first a structural wall panel that was delivered to site and easily installed by the homeowner; then finished into a light, warm, and inviting living space. 🏡🌞

We at New Frameworks started building straw panels in 2018 to make it easy for people to say “yes!” to a healthy, carbon-storing, climate-healing, full-life-cycle material like straw for their buildings. 🌾🌾🌾🌾

Since then, we’ve built and/or manufactured panels for others to build over 35 homes, multi-unit buildings, and institutional/commercial buildings. Partnerships & relationships like the one we have with Love|Schack architects, who are designing on the cutting edge of bio-based materials, are key to that work reaching more communities. We love to collaborate! Reach out to inquire about your next project.

01/30/2026

We at New Frameworks stand in solidarity with immigrants, Minneapolis, Maine, LA, and the majority of our country who reject and are working to counter the authoritarian power grab, secret police, and needless violence against our communities and the Constitution.

01/15/2026

Straw panels in a snowy setting = cozy vibes! We designed and fabricated these wall and roof panels for one of our favorite people: our principal Structural Engineer ❤️, and for his own personal home (such an honor and compliment to have earned that confidence ☺️). He works with us to engineer every one of our custom panel & Casitas projects, and it’s 💯 that the snow loads were accurately calculated and engineered for on this project 🤓📐📏❄️🌨️ as they are on every project. Russ puts the Structure into Structural Straw Insulated Panels (S-SIPs), and now we get to put Russ into a home in return. 🏠

This project went up quickly and easily with one building contractor - their first time working with our panels. The contractor shared that it went really well. He enjoyed working with the panels, didn’t have any issues that weren’t easy adjustments on site, and he said he is very interested in visiting our shop to see the fabrication process, and working with our panels again. We love to hear it. The ease for builders and homeowners to install is a key piece of making climate-smart building a growing reality.

This project captured and stores -14,413 kgCO2e 🌾🌲of carbon, using plants to drawdown gaseous carbon dioxide overloading our atmosphere currently and driving global instability. Since most building projects emit carbon, this approach represents a radical shift to bio based materials in high performance construction - and a path to changing our industry from 40% of global carbon emissions to a drawdown and climate healing force. 🫶🏼⭐️

Address

18A Morse Drive
Burlington, VT
05452

Opening Hours

Monday	9am - 5pm
Tuesday	9am - 5pm
Wednesday	9am - 5pm
Thursday	9am - 5pm
Friday	9am - 5pm

Website

http://www.newframeworks.com/

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