Design
Architect: Ric Butt, Strine Design
For architect Ric Butt, the design was all about how to use the block, achieve the most energy efficient design possible and how the garden could be experienced from every room in the house. From his first visit, Ric could see that there was an opportunity to establish a connection between the front entry and the view through to the rear northern garden. The angled design provided two triangular spaces, a cool southern one for summer and a warm northern one for winter.
The house is not large but feels light, airy and spacious with plenty of sunlight and no wasted space. A skillion roof lifts high to the north, allowing light and sunlight in almost the full width of the house and drops away to the southern boundary creating minimal impact to the southern neighbours.
Opening high to the entire northern length of the building, a full facade of double glazing makes the open plan living spaces feel like a cinema with uninterrupted views to the constantly changing sky and garden. The eastern facade to the street is private with an experimental textured finish achieved by using crushed recycled concrete rubble also used as a finish on the back of the island bench. Other natural materials include recycled timber, steel and glass blending the house into the environment.
Beautiful houses come from great briefs, good working relationships and wonderful clients. The landscaped environment was critical to the design and was also brought into the bathrooms through the use of sandblasted screens designed by local artist Ngaio Fitzpatrick. The house has also recently been nominated as a finalist in the BPN Sustainability Awards and can be seen on the Strine website – www.strineenvironments.com.au
Build
Builder: Strine Construction and Strine Precast
This project was an inner-city knock down and rebuild with all the usual challenges of demolition, removal, ageing services and connections, crane access, easements and setbacks. Other challenges included clay soil, sloping site, cut and fill and drainage problem including no stormwater tie common to many older suburbs including tree canopies which covered the road and we also discovered Telstra lines swung in the trees instead of poles.
The old house was deconstructed rather than demolished fairly carefully in order to retrieve the original roof timbers to be used for the handcrafted front door. It was quite challenging to pull the old roof timbers out and have them x-rayed and then re-milled. Original appliances were also reused in the new house. The owners were great and encouraged experimentation allowing us to develop the unusual recycled "distressed look" front wall of the house which is visible from the street.
Because we use our own highly insulated precast sandwich panels for thermal mass, many subcontractors commented on how pleasant the building was to work on. Even when temperatures rose above 40 degrees the house remained cool in summer, and with minus degrees in winter the house was warm to work in.
Live
The client
When we first decided to build a new house (instead of renovate our old weatherboard house), we had two main criteria: nice temperature inside and attracting small native birds to the garden. We sketched some designs and had discussions with various building companies who all said they could build us that house and would put in lots of insulation to get a high energy star rating. When we first met Ric Butt, we got a different response.
Ric looked at our primitive and incomplete design and said "that's nice but this is what your house needs to look like". We were already aware of the 'passive solar' concept but when he drew a few simple rectangles on a piece of tracing paper, we instantly knew we had found the ideal partner to build our dream home. He never mentioned "energy rating" but talked about a constant internal temperature.
The passive solar design works. During the hottest part of the summer the house would only get to 26C but without that "air conditioning" feel to the air. Lots of ventilation at night would bring the air temperature down to 21C. Several months later during winter, as the outside temperature dropped and the sun warmed the slab, the house would get up to 24C convincing visitors that this "passive solar" thing actually works.
But the temperature is only part of the beauty. The house does not sit square on the block (to face due north) and this creates two wonderful spaces on the north and south sides. Normally one gets a couple of narrow spaces between the fence and the house but rotating the house on the block creates two triangular spaces that are much more usable. The south side is cool in the summer, has wonderful shade, and ferns happily growing. The north side is all native plants (for the birds and insects) with lots of privacy from the street.
Perhaps the best thing is just sitting on the sofa in the evening, looking out through all the glass windows, and enjoying the comfortable feeling and wonderful views into the garden. The skillion roof, light blue ceilings, and sliding glass doors make us feel like we're sitting outside and give us a great connection to our surroundings.
