Indholdsfortegnelse for #75 September-October 2020 i Green Magazine

In this issue, and on the theme of ‘small’, our houses are not simply using their footprint efficiently, they are engaging with their inhabitants both inside and out. Our cover house, on a narrow corner block, makes the most of a borrowed footpath to extend the living space beyond the boundary when the conditions are right. Smaller houses in dense inner-urban neighbourhoods are increasingly considering engagement with the street and their communities; connections that are of such importance right now. Elsewhere in this issue, a family home on a small urban block goes up, rather than out and in the process creates multiple spaces that are active with multiple functions. Another keeps an extension tight so as not to encroach on valuable garden area and a small, semi-detached dwelling creates…

“Bismarck House is experimental and original in nature,” says Andrew Burges, director of Andrew Burges Architects (ABA). As a house intended to be a holiday rental and a future bolthole for the clients, Julia and William Dangar, the ambitious, adventurous brief allowed for greater flexibility and exploration than a family home might. “We were asked to design freely, to do something we hadn’t done before, to experiment with materials and to create an informal house rather than a forever family home,” Andrew explains. And given that Will is a renowned landscape designer and director of Dangar Barin Smith, the garden would inherently be an integral part of the design. “It had to feel sympathetic to the exploratory architecture, and to have high impact visually and be low maintenance,” says Will.…

Architect Austin Maynard Architects maynardarchitects.com Builder CBD Contracting cbdcontracting.com.au Landscape architect Bush Projects bushprojects.com.au Green roof Fytogreen fytogreen.com.au Passive energy design Union is a vertical house, with stacked spaces and voids, unified through the use of exposed cross laminated timber (CLT) walls and ceilings. Carbon sequestering CLT was used to reduce time on-site, minimise trades and accumulated layering within the building process. A water tank is buried in the backyard, a green roof above the bedrooms improves thermal performance and a concrete slab adds thermal mass at ground level. Materials Roofing is Klip-Lok in “Monument” Colorbond finish from Lysaght, Nailstrip in “Monument” Colorbond finish from Fielders, Sarnafil waterproof membrane from Sika, and Suntuf standard corrugated in “Opal”. The house uses recycled red brick. External cladding is EQUITONE “Lines LT20” fibre…

Architect Archier archier.com.au Passive energy design The house is oriented north with expansive double glazing to maximise solar gain during the cooler months. Fully insulated floor, wall and roof panels create a high-performing envelope of 8.4 stars. Sandstone slabs are warmed by the low winter sun, but protected by an eave in summer, helping to keep a stable temperature day through night. Smaller windows to the south and west limit heat gain and loss, with an operable tilt-turn providing passive ventilation. Materials The floor, wall and roof structure is made from structurally insulated panels (SIPs) from Fenster + Panel, creating a high-performance envelope. Resting on steel posts and beams, the panels were installed over two days. Cutting away the foundation’s temporary welds and bolts will allow the house to be…

It’s easy to think that permaculture only applies to those with large gardens or country properties, but there are many things you can do in small space gardens using permaculture principles. As always, start and carry out your actions with thoughtfulness, to get the best result for the energy you’re putting in. In the produce garden, this means growing plants that can be referred to as ‘cut and come again’, so that the harvest is ongoing or repeated, maximising production in your small space garden. Once your plants have been growing for a few weeks, you can harvest a leaf or two from each plant that has at least five or six leaves, then wait until the number increases again before the next harvest. It’s best to always harvest leaves…

Architect Andrew Burges Architects aba-architects.com.au Landscape architect Dangar Barin Smith Interior decoration David Harrison and Karen McCartney Builder Robert Plumb Build Passive energy design The site was chosen by the client, a landscape architect, for its northerly aspect, the north-easterly ocean air, the proximity of local infrastructure and the beach, and the shared public space available to borrow along the northern laneway. Many design principles were set up around strengths given these site attributes. The internal footprint is restrained as far as possible to enable a continuous garden to run along and between rooms. At the ground level, the kitchen is oriented to catch the sun as well as people coming in off the lane. A garden courtyard frames the laneway entry and provides an outlook between both kitchen and…

As an architect renovating his own home, Jeffrey Grant, director of Bokey Grant Architects, had the opportunity to orient the rooms and fine-tune the details in ways that clients might not always say yes to. But this orientation and detailing were crucial to the design of the home that Jeffrey wanted to achieve. Rooms and sightlines connect with the garden to create a more generous sense of space, and junctions and thresholds are subtle yet precise to evoke a conscious experience of transition. The original two-bedroom house, built in the 1920s, is in a row of detached brick workers’ cottages in Lilyfield, Sydney. The house was somewhat neglected when Jeffrey and his wife, Joey, bought it in 2015, and a series of asbestos lean-tos disconnected the interior from its surroundings.…

When a bookcase is the hero of a house, it’s a safe bet the owners love words. But this bookcase is more than a careful curation of paperbacks. It’s the central axis around which an entire house interlocks and overlaps, and the key to the way this project achieves more with less. The owners, publishers Maria Hendriks and Praveen Naidoo, engaged director Ben Callery, of Ben Callery Architects, to restore the front four rooms of their house in Northcote and add a new extension with a backyard for their family of four. They wanted somewhere they could comfortably work or study but still feel connected to the rest of the house and their children. They were also open to Callery and his team challenging the conventional must-haves for a four-person…

Sling Thing Castlemaine-based Industrial Sewing Workshop has very thoughtfully created this “Firewood Sling” to assist you in stacking and carrying wood. That means no more splinters, dirty clothes or encounters with creepy crawlies – we say thank you in advance! industrialsewingworkshop.com Breezy The “Dune blanket” doesn’t just look good, it does good. Made in Kaunas, Lithuania from 75 per cent recycled lambswool, its shipping to Australia has been carbon offset and for every 10 blankets sold, one is sent to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. seljakbrand.com.au Buzz IKEA's research lab Space10 collaborated with designer Tanita Klein and design studio Bakken & Bæck to create Bee Home: a free and open-source design to support local pollinators and empower anyone to do their bit to preserve the world’s biodiversity. space10.com…

At first glance this tiny space seems uncomplicated, basic even. It’s a sign of true excellence in design – when everything seems in its obvious place. Tim Nicholas employed all of his favourite tricks to create a calm and super user-friendly garden for his clients on the five metre x seven metre site. Tim Smart and his team at Wolveridge Architects have excellently designed the alteration to the house. Taking inspiration from the clients’ love of Brutalist architecture, the design shows a perky confidence with in-situ concrete and neat skylights and flow through seating that offered an invitation to Tim Nicholas and his team to follow their lead. “We got off to a really good start with this project – we had really fantastic clients, can’t speak highly enough of…

You know the clients must have had an exceptionally high ratio of wacky ideas to useable space when you hear the architects, Mark Austin and Andrew Maynard – of Austin Maynard Architects (AMA) – describe one of the challenges of the project as channeling the best into one coherent design. “Craig and Heidi were so excited about all these different ideas, and they just kept going off on tangents like, ‘What about if we do this? What about if we do that?’” Mark Austin says. “It wasn’t that we didn’t want them to. We got excited … and explored different ideas with them. But it was [about] consolidating all those ideas into a functional house.” Clients Heidi Chapman and Craig McGrath were first-time renovators, and concede with a laugh they…

Architect Bokey Grant Architects bokeygrant.com Builder Heath Millard and Andrew Connell Passive energy design The original orientation of the house benefited from having great solar access throughout the day. All habitable rooms have a north, east or west-facing window or both. The new openings have all had shading designed into their concept with the important deep threshold openings naturally allowing for shading. This is added to with steel projections and one adjustable awning. Materials The architect generally tried to use locally-sourced materials that have a long life cycle. The design of the house itself recycles as much of the original house as possible rather than starting from new – original roofing/walls/floors where possible etc. The house is insulated to a higher level than the standards suggest. Gas appliances have been…

Josh FitzGerald (a founding director of Archier), and his partner, Millie Ashton, began their Casa Acton project with a question: house or land? After the sale of their apartment, the couple had the resources to invest in only one of the two. Being quintessentially Tasmanian, they chose to wait for the right piece of land; however, that didn’t solve the problem of them needing their own home. At the time, Josh and Millie were renting a poorly oriented, single-glazed and uninsulated caretaker’s cottage. “In the winter, it was colder inside than out,” says Josh. Spurred on by the prospect of another winter, Josh and Millie decided to use part of their savings to build a relocatable home on the bushy outskirts of Millie’s family farm, south-east of Hobart. The couple…

Architect Ben Callery Architects bencallery.com.au Builder Truewood Constructions Passive energy design The house is oriented to bring warming northern sun into the living room and study/second living. The first floor overhang provides shelter from hot summer sun to the north and east. The stair is oriented to provide a shaft of north and western sun deep into the into meals room below. Cross ventilation is a key design strategy with multiple openable windows on opposite sides of rooms where possible, particularly first floor rooms that benefit from the prevailing cool southerly breezes. All first floor windows have electrically operable external shading to block out unwanted summer sun. Materials The front half of the existing house was retained for its embodied energy and retrofitted with new insulation, double-glazed windows and window…

Farm it Forward is a social enterprise program that transforms unused land into market gardens, and helps ease feelings of isolation amongst people in the Blue Mountains community. But within its one short year of operation, Farm it Forward has shown its value to be so much more. It faced an unexpectedly challenging first year due to the critical circumstances caused by drought, bushfires and COVID-19, yet these events demonstrated how important the program is for the environment, community and food security. Manu Prigioni founded Farm it Forward with two young farmers, Jack Galluzzi and Olivia Awaritefe, and Colin Berryman, who is in community development at the city council. The group established the program after looking at council data regarding social isolation, and listening to the concerns of customers at…