Throughout the last twenty five years of building and designing custom homes in the Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico area, life-style homes has constructed homes with almost all of the available building materials. although Life-Style Homes, Inc. has specialized in award winning adobe, frame, and pumice crete construction, we are continually looking for new materials which may help us create a home that is safer, quieter, and more environmentally friendly while at the same time leaving the door open to traditional as well as innovative design approach. E-Crete AAC is one such product. Life-Style Homes, Inc. has now added this great building block to its arsenal of materials used for construction of their custom homes.

Although AAC has been used successfully for more then 70 years all over the world and has more then withstood the test of time, AAC is still relatively new to the United States and to the Southwest,and with the building of a production plant in Casa Grande, Arizona, producing E-Crete AAC, this is rapidly changing. many of the top builders and architects in the Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico area are now designing their homes with AAC instead of some of the other ICF's (Insulated Concrete Forms) that are now on the market. some of the factors involved in this choice are the following;

*E-Crete AAC is solid lightweight block, thus assuring a solid masonry construction-not a form into which a great amount of concrete is poured into-no bracing, no blow-outs, and you can nail or screw anywhere in block, unlike many of the ICF's where there is only a certain area or strip that you can nail or screw into.

*ACC has extraordinary thermal insulating qualities, resulting in a 10" wall that yields an R-31 equivalent rating, thus reducing energy cost for both cooling and heating, and makes the use of additional thermal insulation unnecessary.

*AAC is noncombustible. AAC offers the greatest fire resistance of any building material currently on the market. This is extremely important for all households and even more so for those individuals building homes in areas that can be impacted by forest or brush fires.

*AAC serves as an exceptional acoustic absorption material, thus providing for a quieter and more peaceful living environment.