The Ranch in southern Alberta, Canada, is a residential home and ranch house built with ICFs by SuperForm Products Ltd. The Ranch was the 2nd Runner Up winner in the Unlimited Residential category and also won the People’s Choice award in the 2024 ICF Builder Awards.
Josh Gagnon was the builder subcontractor and ICF installer for the project, which at 7,421 square feet includes an ICF wine cellar 11 feet below the main floor. This house has 45 90-degree corners, 2 t intersections, and four 45-degree corners. Other ICF usage includes 4-foot-tall frost walls below grade and an ICF tee wall off the garage that was designed to support 10 feet of backfill. Underslab insulation consists of 7,421 square feet of SuperForm Hydro Panel EPS 16+. Gagnon says, “Using ICF increased the overall cost by 10%. However, the extra cost is definitely worth it.”

Complexity and Challenges
To accommodate all the corners, Gagnon’s team poured a 4-foot ICF frost wall on 24-inch-wide by 10-inch-thick footings. Then they poured 10 feet of ICF wall above grade with two gable end walls. There is 30 cubic meters of concrete in the footings, 41 cubic meters of concrete in the frost wall, and 84 cubic meters of concrete in the main walls. “Overall we poured 243 cubic meters of concrete for the house and garage, including footings, frost wall, main walls, and floor.”

Concrete was 1 1/2 hours to 1 3/4 hours from the jobsite, which meant that they had to retard the concrete in the first six truckloads. “There were so many corners that had to align with each other, and we also needed to tie the second lift of concrete to the first lift,” Gagnon says. With a rugged and remote site, it was a chore getting concrete trucks into the site. It was also a minimum-impact ground disturbance location.

Beautiful Design and Sustainability
The team had to take care to have the concrete perfectly aligned in order to perfectly match the hand-worked timber frame tie-ins. A large boulder, which forms a table feature in the wine cellar, had to be dropped into the space early on in the build.

“As you can see from the photos you can build an ICF home that looks like a timber-frame house,” says Gagnon. “This ranch home comes with the benefits of an ICF envelope and the attractive looks of a timber framed home. As you drive up to the house, the cobblestone drive and exterior rock and fir siding do a great job of blending into the foothills where the house sits. Huge rock retaining walls were built before the house was started, making a nice, level area to build this home, even though it is in the hills. As you walk into the entrance, the timber framing, chandeliers, fireplace, and furniture pull what you see outside right into the inside. Over at the kitchen the copper oven hood, table and island make a bold statement, inviting you to pull up a chair. And last but definitely not least is the beautiful wine cellar down in the basement. The rock table is an outstanding feature.”

Using ICF up to the rafters maximizes the homeowners’ energy savings. Using R-60 insulation in the attic helps regulate the temperature enough that they didn’t need to install air conditioning even though they have a southern exposure. Installing radiant heat in the entire house and garage helps with temperature regulation.

“This house goes to show that anything can be built with ICF and along with that your house can look how you want it to,” says Gagnon. “There are no design limitations with ICF and this house stands proud in the foothills of Alberta proving that.”

The owner made the decision to build with ICFs and they were already familiar with ICFs at the onset of this project. Gagnon says the owners are very satisfied with their ICF home and will never live in a home that is not built with ICF.