🌐 High-Performance Passive House Windows, Made 20 Miles From Midtown NYC

Last year, while companies across the construction industry were raising prices because of tariffs, Wythe Windows lowered its prices.

Wythe makes high-performance passive-house windows 20 miles from Midtown Manhattan.

In Ramsey. A suburb in New Jersey.

Darren Macri, Wythe’s co-founder and co-CEO, did not come from the window business. He went to film school at NYU. In the mid-2000s, his father needed help with a development project in Hoboken. Darren left his career in entertainment and stepped in.

Building gave him a lot of what he loved about filmmaking: teams, the creative process, something growing out of the ground.

Then he found passive house.

The idea is simple in principle and difficult in practice: engineer the building envelope so precisely — the insulation, the windows, the airtight seal — that you can cut the heating and cooling load by up to 90%  without sacrificing comfort, air quality, or aesthetics.

He fell in love with it. Couldn’t unsee it. Had to have it. Had to live in it.

So he built the first passive house in New Jersey. 

That house exposed a Passive House industry bottleneck: windows.

Windows are one of the most critical components. Triple-pane glass. Triple gasketing. Tight seals that keep heat in, cold out, noise out, and smog out of apartments where people are trying to sleep.

The highest-performance passive-house windows came from Europe. That meant elevated prices, middlemen who did not prioritize customer service, and customers with no one local to call when orders arrived wrong or incomplete.

So Darren started making them himself.

Almost immediately, as he was getting the company off the ground, the market proved his point. Another importer had sold three thousand European windows to a major New York City developer, but the hardware didn’t meet the specs. Darren and his business partner jumped in to fix them.

No factory yet. Just sawhorses, DeWalt drills, and a belief that doing this stateside was essential to scaling the industry.

Three thousand fixed windows later, the fee from that job became the seed capital for Wythe’s first production line.

Today, Wythe runs four automated lines and ships coast to coast for projects ranging from high-end new construction to affordable-housing retrofits in places like the South Bronx, where better windows mean an immediate quality-of-life upgrade: lower energy bills, quieter rooms, cleaner air, and greater comfort.

Now Darren is pushing the same idea further: from high-performance windows to high-performance retrofits for entire buildings.

Here’s what stood out from our conversation.

The Wizard of Oz moment

"It was like that moment in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy's black-and-white world turned to color. And once you see it, you just can't turn back."

Darren on discovering passive house at a LEED conference in 2009.

How Wythe got started

"We had just some sawhorses and some DeWalt drills, some of which we still even have to this day. We fixed three thousand windows and sent them back. And that became the seed money that started the company."

Why New Jersey makes sense

"Not just anywhere in New Jersey — twenty miles from Midtown Manhattan. We're only three and a half hours from Boston, an hour and a half from Philadelphia, down to DC."

What automation actually delivers

"I visited companies doing similar volume to us, and they have exponentially more employees working to do that volume because everything's happening by hand. We're doing everything automated. That gives us not only superior competitive pricing, but also superior quality and consistency — and some of the fastest lead times."

The product choice that defined the company

"We could have made a gorgeous architectural wood window and touched the luxury market. Or a high-end aluminum window. But they're not going to make a big enough difference in operational carbon in enough buildings. We focused on a product that could be absolutely luxurious — our windows are installed in the homes of movie stars — and also meet the most stringent passive house standards, and also be affordable enough to be a replacement window in the South Bronx."

What changes the night the window gets replaced

"In these apartment buildings, they're not huge rooms — people push their beds right up against the window. If your bed's against a window with a lot of thermal loss, you're going to be uncomfortable. You're going to have mold growth. They're not thinking about the energy bill. They notice it the very first night."

How Wythe lowered prices during a tariff wave

"We did a reevaluation of our production and saw that with the additional automation we'd put in place, we had to reevaluate our timing on manufacturing. And as we've grown, we've gotten more buying power with our suppliers. The combination of those two things — we actually lowered our prices last year."

While everyone else was raising them.

The retrofit opportunity

"There are many more buildings out there built today than new ones that will be built in the next ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years. We have to figure out how to make those buildings energy efficient, how to electrify them, in a mass production kind of way that's scalable, affordable, and can make the biggest difference as soon as possible — because the clock on the climate crisis is ticking."

What he sees when everyone else sees amazing

"People give tours here at the factory, and they're like, my god, it's amazing. And I'm like — you see amazing? I see a thousand problems."

Supercool Takeaway

The passive house movement had the science, the standards, and the demand. What it didn’t have was a U.S. manufacturing model capable of making one of its most critical components affordable, reliable, and locally accountable.

Darren saw that and built it.

Everything else — the automation, the pricing, the South Bronx retrofits — follows from that one decision.

Operator Takeaways

Automate before you need to.
Wythe bought its first fully automated line before the volume justified it. Years later, that decision helped the company lower prices during a tariff wave.

Build for the hardest market.
Darren could have chased luxury first. Instead, Wythe built its cost structure around affordable housing retrofits and other projects that need high-performance windows without high-end budgets. If the economics work there, the luxury market still comes along.

Proximity is a product.
Three and a half hours from Boston. An hour and a half from Philadelphia. Close to New York City. When the alternative is importing windows from Europe through middlemen, being nearby — and accountable — is part of what Wythe sells.

This Week’s Podcast Episode:

High-Performance Passive House Windows, Made 20 Miles From Midtown NYC

🎙️ Listen on Apple, Spotify, and all other platforms.

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