HOUSING ESTATE HOUSE
location:
Milton, New South Wales, Australia.
Yuin country.
program: residential – family home.
status: completed, built project.
This project is an architect designed, custom-built house for specific clients. It was created using a mass housing style builder and it is located within a conventional, new suburban housing estate. It is not a display home, but through the benefits for living that it achieves within the housing estate context, and within the budgetary constraints that appeal to the mass housing market, it acts as an exemplar of the positive impacts that quality design can bring to this vast housing sector. The project cooperatively harnesses the efficiencies of the mass housing market and applies them through sound architectural fundamentals.
The Architect’s Accreditation Council of Australia (AACA) estimates that only “5 – 10% of single residential homes are architect designed.” While accounting for large volumes of housing, suburban estates are broadly criticised for their lack of design innovation, where the services of architects are rarely offered and hardly welcomed. An antagonistic relationship between architecture and housing estate construction is of widespread detriment to our cities. This project seeks to break down and challenge that relationship by providing good design that is accessible and affordable to all.
Notwithstanding its standard materials, detailing and construction methods, this house features natural cross ventilation and north facing windows to every room. Specially adapted standard eaves and sunshading control solar gains to windows, as well as enabling the utilisation of the carefully positioned thermal mass of standard brickwork for warmth in winter and coolness in summer.
Materials and finishes are standard but thoughtfully selected with consideration of light and shadows, creating atmospheres with textures and contrasts. Standard roof trusses are exposed in main areas giving a sense of workmanship, hierarchy and drama. While large, the house is smaller than the national average, and spaces are not ostentatious or unnecessary. There are flexible, adaptable relationships and connections between functional areas, and between inside and outside, with consideration of the specific surrounding context in all directions.
The beneficial impacts of this design are numerically quantifiable. The construction cost is under $1,250 per square metre, which aligns with conventional housing estate rates Prior to occupying this new house, the client lived in a small, nearby apartment where their daily electricity consumption for August 2018 was 30kW/h, which aligns with local averages. In comparison, the August 2019 daily consumption of the same client, but in the new, larger house, was only 12kW/h. Alongside the tactile, experiential and indirect pleasures and benefits of living in a thoughtfully designed home, the financial outcomes of this project are tangible to everyone.
In a 7 August 2019 article on realestate.com, a conventional housing estate builder announced that as an optional extra they can provide designs that are in an “architecturally inspired” style. In conscious contrast to that kind of statement, this project is not a mass housing design that is “architecturally inspired” but instead a fundamentally inspired design, based on sound architectural concepts and available to everyone.
photography:
Nathan Divine