Anathea Fenton runs DCI Nova Scotia and the Halifax branch of Falkbuilt — a prefab interior-wall company that ships pre-wired panels, cuts on-site labour, and has held its price for two years. The catch: if architects don't specify it at the design brief, it won't fit in your project at all.
There is a specific moment in construction when a new technology stops being an option. Fenton names it exactly: by the time a project team has a tender package in hand, the wall system is already decided. The structural drawings are done, the specifications are written, and anything that doesn't match them gets set aside. If a product like Falkbuilt's prefabricated interior-wall system isn't baked into the design from the start, it almost certainly won't appear in the build. That is the core challenge for off-site interior construction in Atlantic Canada right now — not the technology, not the cost, and not the supply chain.
Fenton came to that conclusion by working both sides of it. She is President of the Design and Construction Institute of Nova Scotia, a 50-year-old cross-sector association that brings architects, engineers, contractors, government, and higher education to the same table. She is also the principal of Falkbuilt Halifax, the Atlantic Canada branch of a Calgary-headquartered company that manufactures prefabricated interior components. The two roles give her an unusual view: she understands both why the industry defaults to drywall and what it would take to change that.
A 50-year-old association built on the idea that silos lose
DCI was never designed to be a trade group for one corner of the industry. The founding logic, as Fenton describes it, was that fragmented advocacy produces fragmented results. "rather than having silos of the builders having their association the architects the interior designers dci was founded to promote partnership" — one voice, one room, more credibility with government than any single association could carry alone.
That credibility shows up in the membership's track record. When DCI organized a full-day procurement workshop, it drew "over 125 attendees from all aspects of the industry in a full day workshop to talk about procurement public procurement". Getting competing trade associations to sit in the same room on the same policy question is hard; getting 125 of them to show up and stay all day is harder. The DCI model produces that kind of turnout because the mandate is shared infrastructure, not competitive positioning.
For its first fifty years, DCI ran on a closed membership loop — the board and the alumni of the board. When Fenton's strategic planning work opened that up, it was a genuine shift. "the membership consisted of existing board members and all of the past board members right but not open to the industry" — and the pandemic, counterintuitively, created the window to fix it. "we took the opportunity to really work hard on our strategic plan objectives that we had worked through last year", Fenton says. Slow periods make planning possible; the associations that use them well come out of them with better infrastructure than they went in with.
How the wall system actually works
Falkbuilt's system is built on three components: a super-stud, a set of digital horizontal panels, and pre-finished cladding. Each is manufactured off-site and assembled on the job. The studs are the first clue that this isn't a direct drywall substitute: "the super studs are 48 inches on center so you don't need them every 16 inches you need fewer of them which is part of the speed". Fewer studs means fewer pieces to handle, faster installation, and less on-site labour — a compounding advantage as trades shortages in Nova Scotia deepen.
The electrical integration is the second clue. Conventional drywall construction requires a separate mobilisation for rough-in wiring after the stud work is done. In Falkbuilt's system, that step mostly disappears: "the digital come with the duplex receptacles and pre-mounted and wired so all you have to do is connect to a junction box". The sub-trade still makes the final connection, but the wire runs are already in the panel when it arrives on site. The sequence compression is real.
Acoustically, the system exceeds drywall performance. The cladding arrives pre-finished, so the tape, mud, and paint sequence is gone. And the Canadian supply chain — manufacturing from factories in Canada — is what backs the pricing claim that a builder in Nova Scotia's current market would reasonably find hard to believe: at the time of the episode, Falkbuilt had been in the market for roughly two years and had not raised prices once. "in the two years that faulk built has been in the market they have not had a price increase and don't foresee any". In a period when material costs were moving fast, that kind of locked-price supply chain is a procurement argument, not just a product feature.
The sustainability case is a demolition argument, not a badge
The design-for-disassembly claim that prefab companies often make can sound like marketing. Fenton grounds it in something concrete: what actually happens at demolition. With conventional drywall, the answer is landfill. "if you tear out a drywall wall you can't do that without destroying the base material components right so you're pretty much having to dump all of that". Construction and demolition waste accounts for an estimated 30 to 40 percent of total landfill material — a figure corroborated by Canadian federal data. A wall system whose components can be disassembled and reused doesn't just reduce that number on a single project; it holds value across the asset's full life cycle, which changes the procurement math for long-cycle owners.
For healthcare owners in particular, the calculus goes further. Hospital renovation typically means rooms offline, which means patients displaced, care disrupted, and significant operating cost. "our hospital systems can't afford nor can our patients not afford to be in the rooms when they need to be in it". A prefab system that compresses the installation schedule and produces less demolition debris reduces that downtime directly. It's why healthcare is the clearest near-term market for this technology in Atlantic Canada.
EchoDome and the distributed design problem
Falkbuilt's coordination tool, EchoDome, is a Revit add-on that pushes a model into a cloud-based 3D environment accessible from any device — no specialist hardware required. "the project team members can meet up in the dome and make real-time decisions about their in the dome". For a distributed project team trying to align on finishes and layouts before manufacturing begins, that's the whole point: decisions made in EchoDome before fabrication are cheap; the same decisions made after materials are cut are not.
The technology has already moved in markets outside Atlantic Canada. Falkbuilt was part of the team that won Oxford Properties' Workplace Innovation Challenge in Toronto — a hackathon-style competition that resulted in several completed projects. The system has also reached Arctic and Antarctic builds, healthcare facilities in the Middle East, and commercial projects across North America. Atlantic Canada is not the proving ground; it's the adoption window.
The architect problem — and when the window closes
Fenton is direct about where the barrier sits. It is not sceptical contractors or unconvinced owners. It is the design stage. "by the time they get the tender package or design package it's almost too late to insert these solutions into the mix". The product cannot be swapped in at tender the way a fixture brand can be swapped. It has to be specified during the design brief, which means the architect has to know it exists, understand how the system works, and choose to design around it. General contractors are currently the most active early adopters — partly because the labour-savings argument lands hardest where trades shortages are most acute, and Nova Scotia's labour market is one of those places.
The Halifax branch's near-term goal is straightforward: get the product in front of architects and designers who are working on healthcare, commercial, and housing projects now. Atlantic Canada is in the middle of a sustained infrastructure and housing build cycle. The projects being designed today will be tendered in the next two to three years. The specification decisions are being made now.
Falkbuilt Halifax
Falkbuilt manufactures prefabricated interior components — super-studs, digital horizontal panels, and pre-finished cladding — through a process the company calls Digital Component Construction. The system is produced factory-direct through independently owned branches. Falkbuilt Halifax serves Atlantic Canada.
If you are designing or specifying a healthcare, commercial, or institutional project in Atlantic Canada, Falkbuilt's system warrants a look before the design documents are issued — because after that, the window closes. Visit falkbuilt.com for system details, specifications, and to connect with the Halifax branch.
Guest: Anathea Fenton, President, DCI Nova Scotia; Principal, Falkbuilt Halifax. Episode 10 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Featured: Falkbuilt Ltd. — LinkedIn · Instagram · YouTube. Also mentioned: Design and Construction Institute of Nova Scotia (DCI), Oxford Properties. Receipt sources: Falkbuilt founding/funding (2019); Oxford Properties competition; Canadian C&D landfill data.