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When briefing MDC Architects to design their new home, the clients requested the most sustainable house possible for their family of four.
‘The owners are very conscious of their footprint on the environment and didn’t want to build a home that was any larger than what could provide the absolute necessity for their lives,’ says Matt Delroy-Carr, principal of MDC Architects.
It was the architect’s job to design the most functional home, on the smallest possible footprint, and within a modest budget for an architect-designed house.
The appearance of the resulting 133-square-metre house was inspired by mid-century Australian architecture — a style appropriate for the home’s location and subdivided block.
The building’s simple form and functional layout is captured beneath a low-slung roof following the natural topography of the site.
Subtle level changes indoors work to both define certain areas of the floor plan, and encourage the client’s view outwards towards the establishing garden spaces. Landscape designer Pete Dwyer designed each of these outdoor areas to offer a different feel and planting palette.
‘The majority of the gardens are to the north, so each of the main living spaces, as well as the main bedroom, have a connection to these brighter sunlit garden spaces, whilst the more compact southern and western gardens offer a passive connection to the wet areas and the secondary bedrooms, acting as a buffer to the neighbours and an opportunity for a differing planting palette,’ says Matt.
The exterior material choice is unfussy — made up of only compressed fibre cement sheet cladding — again to draw the eye towards the garden.
Internally, the home is much warmer, with recycled bricks and plywood forming the central kitchen volume. Painted Durra Panel (compressed straw) walls and ceilings create a subtle rippling effect that imparts texture.
These materials are just one part of the home’s ‘life cycle,’ which measures the environmental impact of the building from raw material extraction right through to processing, construction, the product’s use phase, and end-of-life impact.
A life cycle assessment by Cerclos determined this house achieves an 85 per cent saving in ‘Global Warming Potential’ — a metric that holistically accounts for the building’s upfront carbon, embodied carbon, operational carbon, and whole life carbon — compared to a standard building envelope.
‘We tried to balance the materials chosen for the build based on their embodied energy, as well as how they performed thermally,’ says Matt.
The architect says ‘everything’ in the home is about the northern sun passage. Using passive design principles to control much light and warmth comes through the large expanses of glass is paramount to how the house functions.
The all-electric house contains a 6.6kW solar PV array and greywater system, and ultimately achieves 7.8 NatHERS star rating.
