There are over 70 low energy and carbon standards in use around the world. None of these standards have been designed by the clients who pay for and occupy the buildings in question. In this work the client was asked to define the building code via a structured survey. This approach was applied to the design and construction of a new 2 800 m2 building. The resulting zero-energy standard simply required the building to incur no energy utility bill. One year of monitoring of the completed building was used to see if the standard had been met. The result of this work is a new way of thinking about environmental building standards that solves many of the issues of obtaining and maintaining buy-in from the client.