I recall reading an article about cookie-cutter houses, produced en masse by volume builders, calling them “Glorified tents”. My inlaws live in a volume built house in the western suburbs of Melbourne. It’s a massive house, poorly constructed, terribly insulated, freezing in winter and hot in summer. We already lived in a tent, this immediately ruled out this style of home.
Being environmentally conscious, we also wanted a house that was not energy intensive to heat and cool.
After downloading the cadastral map of our block, I went about playing around with designs in Adobe Illustrator. Each day over the seasons I would watch how the sun moved and would measure the shadows being cast to plan for a verandah. Our block is located on the south side of the street and would allow us to soak up the winter sun, the only issue was its frontage was more north-west, so if we wanted a true north-facing house, we would need to rotate it 30 degrees clockwise.
Design
We had watched Grand Designs UK religiously over many years, I had noticed the gradual increase of the use of Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs), and wondered how they would work in our environment and then combining it with Passive House principles.
3D Render
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