Caroline Paules (BS ’19) spent eight years volunteering with unhoused neighbors in Pasadena, handing out sandwiches most weeks, before she connected the problem to her training. As she told Pasadena Weekly, it took years to occur to her that a mechanical engineer might do something about the housing shortage she was watching up close.
Now she’s CEO of Nova Cottage Co., a startup building single- and multi-unit cottages designed to make high-quality housing more affordable and faster to build. The homes plug into a shared hub she calls the Nova Grid, which handles water filtration, greywater recycling, wastewater treatment, and power. Together, those systems let a cluster of cottages run off-grid for up to two weeks.
The company came together at Idealab, the Pasadena incubator founded by fellow Techer Bill Gross (BS ’81). Gross read about the modular-housing work of architect Karin Najarian, a Woodbury University graduate, recruited her as COO, and brought in Paules, who had spent years at Heliogen scaling technology products. That mass-manufacturing mindset is what Nova is now applying to homes, rather than building them one site at a time.
The first cottage breaks ground in an Altadena backyard this summer, on the site of a garage lost to the Eaton Fire. Paules, whose own home was the only one left standing on her block, is building where she lives.
Read the full story at Pasadena Weekly.