Sustainability. From the start.

Designing more sustainably has material, performance, energy, lifecycle and community dimensions. It also has financial implications. Thinking these things through effects the size of the buildings we design, their siting and orientation, the way they look, the materials they are made from and the technology they employ to keep their occupants comfortable year-round.

We apply the following principles to the buildings we design.

Chris and Nat’s home in Bingie repurposes two existing structures. A new roof and glazing is designed to bring winter sunshine deep into the house and naturally cross-ventilate key rooms. An additional layer of sliding screens allow occupants to respond to insects, privacy and sunlight independent of the weather sealing doors. **House Bingie**

Designing in response to the natural environment

Sun, shade, wind and rain are free natural resources that can be harnessed once understood. Designing sensitively and intelligently in response to the specific conditions of each site helps our buildings perform well year-round.

Winter sunshine should be allowed to enter deep into key spaces and store its heat in materials with high thermal mass while mid-summer sun is excluded. Cross-ventilation and understanding the qualities of the prevailing winds (cooling summer and warming winter breezes are best), getting the orientation right and designing the building envelope to perform and weather well are the key principles of passive design.

Energy

If we make sound architectural decisions then the need to heat and cool our buildings is greatly reduced. The principles of designing in response to environment provides the foundation for an energy-efficient home.

Heating and cooling strategies are particular to each project. However, our homes are generally fully-electric, generate energy via PVs and utilise heat pumps to heat and cool via in-slab hydronic systems. Batteries are often coupled with PVs.

**Kangaroo Valley house** is off-grid in bushfire country. A 15KW photovoltaic array will provide the energy needs for a fully-electric home. A bank of high-level operable windows allows winter sunshine to enter the middle of the house whilst also allowing rooms to naturally cross-ventilate.

A family of free-standing circular bronze-ribbed structures create a generous covered area creating presence and functionality with minimal intrusion. They are places of information and exchange but at the same time act as playful markers and meeting points; elements of urban furniture who’s structural immateriality acts in gentle opposition to Utzon’s heavy orthogonal platform and impossibly beautiful ‘clouds’. **Visitor Information Centre & Ticketing Booths at Sydney Opera House**

Less but better

We argue for less but better.

In every project we seek a poetic and harmonious economy of means. Once aspects of siting and planning have been resolved and our clients and agree that the scheme has strong bones, do we feel like we have then earned the right to explore the poetic spatial and material possibilities and detailed resolution that make projects sing.

The added bonus of doing less is that projects are cheaper to build, more energy and carbon efficient and garden spaces are larger!

Materials

There is a carbon, lifecycle, poetry and performance dimension to every material in a building and all of these things are taken into consideration when designing. We tend to work with a small palette of well-understood, durable and locally sourced materials. We know how they behave over time, what they can and can’t do, and we know how well they perform.

Stained hardwood cladding, galvanised steel and recycled clay bricks constitute the material palette of **House: Tempe**. A new room stitches into its sandstone host bringing northern light deep into the floor plan, opening the house to the north easterly breeze. A series of deep steps elongate the living area connecting house to garden.

Eco Prefab was a construction system designed to allow temporary buildings to be disassembled, moved and re-erected in the same or in a new configuration. **Eco Prefab I & II**

Longevity and flexibility

Quality construction, simple details and durable materials reduces costs over time and helps ensure a building ages well. Designing for flexibility and adaptability allows the building to respond to the various stages of our client’s lives and ever-changing outdoor conditions.

To “belong” is to be “suitable, appropriate or advantageous”

Being passionate about nature and the underlying principles of the natural world logically leads to an interest in 'the local'. We aspire to being local!

Every living thing has been ‘designed' in response to particular parameters, driven by performance! As the parameters change, nature evolves.

Similarly, architecture is a game of responding to each projects particular parameters rationally and also poetically - be they physical, temporal, social, cultural or political. Good architecture, sustainable architecture knows where it is and knows why it is. It belongs because it responds to the particular conditions in which it finds itself and makes a positive contribution to place.

A new playground cuts into the bitumen slope to create a level play area and amphitheatre seating for the school. **Amenities upgrade and Active Playground at Coogee Public School.**

**House in a Garden in Marrickville** is informed by context, landscape and topography. The roof is a wild, native garden set out at the upper floor level. Additions cascade down the site, each level informed by topography, each living space opening directly onto new garden spaces. The building steps back to the southern boundary maximising winter sun penetration and focusing attention on a verdant garden - imagined as a kind of family square or piazza. The natural pool is filtered by aquatic plants.

Start with the garden

We value the outdoors as much as the indoors.

We believe that starting with a garden or gardens and designing the house around green space gives every room the opportunity to bring nature in through beautiful thresholds. This allows the architecture to reduce, to simplify and be calm, and when we say nature, we don’t just mean leaves and rocks and trees, we mean any place that sunlight is invited into or wind blows or any place where leaves can fall .

It’s imperative that architecture begins with the garden and grows from there. We consider garden spaces as rooms, outdoor rooms rather than landscape being a tack-on or after thought.

Adapt. Reuse

Adaptive reuse refers to repurposing an existing structure for new use.

Instead of demolishing and starting from scratch, sometimes, even buildings of poor quality can be incorporated for economic as well as sustainable advantage. Old structures have the advantage of time. They have aged and they have worked and this work is evidenced in their fabric. We find this beautiful.

When an existing structure has good or at least good enough bones, we will try to incorporate it into the project. Sometimes the puzzle is not working out what to do but what not to do.

**House Bingie** aggressively repurposes an old bard and project home. Stage 1 (barn) is complete in this image with Stage 2 (the brick structure beyond) yet to begin.

One wall of this studio is clad in a triple-skin of translucent polycarbonate that seals, insulates, provides informal shelving whilst bathing the interior in light. At night it becomes a lantern animating the garden. **House Tempe**

Affordability & sustainability

A sustainable house need not be an expensive house. There are strategies we adopt at every stage of the project that help reduce cost.

The two most significant gains we can make are reducing time and reducing size.

Reducing size is addressed above. Reducing time means taking our time and consultant time and builders time out of the project. Not every client values detail so if we can focus the design time at the front of the project and leave the details for the builder to resolve then big gains are made to the cost of construction.

Longer term, working with good consultants, quality materials, a well-insulated building envelope, double-glazed windows, solar PVs and smart heating and cooling systems means higher up-front cost but significantly lower running costs. A tight floor plan reduces material and construction cost and increases garden area where money goes much further.

Wellbeing

None of these ideas talk directly to the things we love about beautiful buildings - the quality, warmth and comfort beautifully designed spaces and gardens bring into our lives, not to mention how inspiring it is to live and work in a considered environment.

That said, the principles above don’t lead to an uninspiring, unimaginative, hermetically sealed building. On the contrary, by embracing these principles, each project becomes more and more beautiful as they become more responsive, appropriate and mindful of where they are and what they are.