Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 66 i Sanctuary: Modern Green Homes

This issue we celebrate Sustainable House Day, coming up on Sunday 21 April with a return to in-person open homes for the first time since the pandemic! We can’t wait. The program also includes an enticing series of online extension sessions across the following weeks; check out the rundown on page 16 for the full details. As usual, our collection of house profiles – including several homes that are opening their doors for the perennially popular event – brings you a wealth of considered design, energy saving measures, and materials ideas. There’s a family dwelling bucking the cookiecutter project home trend in Tamworth, a Melbourne Passive House designed to deliver super fresh air inside, and a Perth architect’s own compact home that was a testing ground for his efficient, affordable…

BOOKS Tasmania Living Joan-Maree Hargreaves & Marita Bullock Thames & Hudson, 2022 $70 Content warning: this book may make you want to move to Tassie immediately. Subtitled Quiet, conscious living in Australia’s south, the coffee-table style volume features 20 projects ranging from restored colonial cottages to modernist homes nestled into their surroundings. Many have beautiful views, and all are somehow imbued with a sense of quiet calm – something that is perhaps a hallmark of exemplary design. At the smaller end of the scale, an A-frame treehouse in Hobart built by an architect as a hideaway for his kids is absolutely charming; it was created using years of collected timber offcuts, leftovers and would-be waste materials. Just out of the city, another tiny project is a cost-efficient solution to the…

HELEN OAKEY STEPS UP AS RENEW CEO The Renew Board is very pleased to announce the appointment of Helen Oakey as the organisation’s new CEO. Helen has a strong background in sustainability, community engagement and climate advocacy. As Executive Director of the ACT Conservation Council, she led work on fossil gas and transport emissions, biodiversity, and planning. She instigated an online community engagement tool to help Canberrans get off gas, and advocated for the ACT to go gas-free, a goal to which the ACT government committed in 2022. Her advocacy experience is grounded in eight years as a parliamentary advisor and a stint heading up Greenpeace’s advocacy team. We are very excited to have Helen on board, and are confident that her expertise managing community-based not-for-profit organisations and her understanding…

Anna: Georgia, can you tell us a bit about Bank Australia’s purpose, and how it’s different from other banks? Georgia: Bank Australia is a mutual bank and a B Corp [Ed note: certified as meeting high social sustainability, environmental and accountability standards], and we describe ourselves as the bank for people who believe in a fair and inclusive society. We’re owned by our customers, not shareholders, and every customer has an equal voice and vote on how the bank is run. Our clean money promise means we use our customers’ money in ways that have a positive impact on people and planet. Anna: How and why did climate action come to be a key part of the bank’s impact strategy? Georgia: We regularly ask our customers about the issues most…

Sustainable House Day is an event from Renew that provides the opportunity to explore some of Australia’s most inspiring homes, and learn from the people who designed them, built them, and live in them. We’re thrilled to be back in person this year for the first time since 2019. The event has evolved, with a framework of tour times and ticketing to ensure the safety of participants and homeowners. Along with visiting homes in person, you will also be n able to attend Community Partner events around the country, as well as join our famous online Extension Session series that brings together architects, experts and homeowners with plenty of time for Q&A. Explore the full program at sustainablehouseday.com. On Sunday 21st April 2024, over 100 homes across the country will…

AT A GLANCE - Comfortable, quiet, healthy city living for a family with respiratory issues - Certified Passive House with airtightness of 0.41ACH - All-electric, energy efficient and thermally high performing - Existing house relocated for a new life When smoke from the Black Summer bushfires sent the particulate count on their air quality monitors through the roof in late 2019, Erin and her husband Martin started to wonder whether renovating and extending their period home as they’d planned was going to be the most futureproof option. “The events of that summer were huge, and really made us question what makes for a healthy home that suits the climate we might experience in the future,” explains Erin. The family already understood the impact of air quality on their health, living next to the…

Gardening is my greatest anchor to nature’s cycles, my best teacher, a salve for my mental health, and the most tangible link to the knowledge of my ancestors. And yet, it is something that periodically brings me great heartbreak. This is because, as a renter, every few years I have had to farewell my carefully tended garden and confront the reality of a new leased home, inevitably featuring compacted soil and overgrown couch grass. It’s painful, but after a period of mourning I always roll up my sleeves and start the cycle again. At the start of Melbourne’s long lockdowns I moved to a property with great gardening potential. I threw myself into the task with gusto, and with stay-at-home orders in place I often gardened from dawn until dusk.…

AT A GLANCE - All-electric, smallfootprint family home on a modest block - Designed for efficiency and buildability on a budget - Life cycle analysis indicates it’s a True Net Zero house When it comes time to design and build their own homes, many architects and building designers take the opportunity to use them as testing grounds for ideas for future client projects. Architect Matt Delroy-Carr’s recently completed family home in the Perth suburb of White Gum Valley is a great example. Matt has recent experience designing townhouse projects for developers, often practising ‘sustainability by stealth’ and honing his understanding of small footprint design, optimal orientation, and how to maximise garden space without inhibiting the functionality of the home. “I was keen to take those ideas and apply them to a detached…

AT A GLANCE - Minimal demolition: existing house retained and improved - New open-plan kitchen and living area vastly improves connection to garden - Multipurpose, thermally efficient and accessible spaces suited to family living Antony, Lizzie and their two kids lived in their federation-style suburban home for eight years before starting out on their renovation journey in 2021. The original cottage had undergone a modest renovation in the 1990s, and was basically a series of small rooms off a central corridor: lounge, kitchen and three bedrooms, with a bathroom and laundry tacked onto the back – unfortunately, neatly separating the kitchen from the garden. “This arrangement works okay when you have very little kids, but it wasn’t a very functional family house,” says Antony. “There was certainly no large space where everyone…

When we met Jess and David in our Design Workshop back in Sanctuary 58, they were recently married and living in the ground floor apartment in Braddon that Jess had bought several years earlier. While they loved its location and its northern outlook onto their productive courtyard garden, they were looking to improve the natural light and the functionality of the spaces – particularly with a possible future family in mind. Fast forward a couple of years and the couple now share the 62-square-metre apartment with their bouncing son, born in early 2023. Luckily, they did go ahead and make some changes, drawing inspiration from the advice offered by architect and small space expert Kate Shepherd as part of the Design Workshop process. Kate suggested reconfiguring the layout to increase…

Building designer Ecolibrium Designs ecolibrium.com.au Works in Queensland What kind of house did you grow up in? My childhood was spent in a rambling, low-set timber house that was the manager’s residence at the Mossman Sugar Mill in far north Queensland. It was too big even for a family of six. The sugarcane harvesting season and the wet season were the main rhythms of life. What was the first design project you were really proud of? My first full house design, in the Currumbin Ecovillage. The sustainable design covenant was extensive and strict but taught me an enormous amount. The only negative comment I got from the client was that they wished they hadn’t installed the ceiling fans because they never needed them. What is your favourite sustainable building and…