Sanctuary: Modern green homes

Sanctuary magazine issue 9 – preview

From Sanctuary magazine issue 9. Buy or subscribe.

16-page sample from Sanctuary magazine issue 9, the “small houses” issue.

Small houses

From Sanctuary magazine issue 9. Buy or subscribe.

By Fiona Negrin

The Small House movement is to homes what the Slow Food movement is to dinner: a celebration of sustainability, simplicity and nourishment. It’s a trend that’s gained momentum in recent years thanks to the trifecta of increasing climate change awareness, the global financial crisis and rising real estate prices.

The Small House movement is most active in the US, where people of all ages and incomes are foregoing “trophy” houses for small, even tiny, abodes that free up their time and money.

After transport and agriculture, housing is the most resource-intensive industry in the western world, according to Shay Salomon, author of one of the movement’s defining books, Little House on a Small Planet. “There’s an enormous amount of destruction required for construction,” Salomon says, “both in clearing the land and then in all the materials that go into the building, and then all the long term costs that go into running those buildings”.

Salomon co-founded the Small House Society with Jay Shafer, Nigel Valdez and Gregory Paul Johnson in 2002. Jay Shafer’s guiding philosophy is “dream big, build small.” At 30 square metres, the first tiny house Shafer built is so modest it’s blushing, but he credits it with transforming and “uncluttering” his life.

Ten years on, Shafer has built 12 tiny houses, lived in three different ones, and become an ardent spokesperson for the movement. He’s written The Small House Book and started his own company, Tumbleweed Tiny Houses, to provide plans and build small houses for others.

Gregory Paul Johnson, author of Put Your Life on a Diet: Lessons Learned from Living in 140 Square Feet, lives in a diminutive house designed and built by Tumbleweed Tiny Houses. It’s a freestanding, movable, battery-powered house that was conceived as being part of a community of tiny houses where common resources like kitchen and laundry would be shared.

At three by two metres square, you can buy wardrobes bigger than Johnson’s house, dubbed “the Mobile Hermitage”, but it’s an exemplar of creative solutions to space constraints, with all areas performing multiple functions. A queen-size loft bed is accessed by a fold-away ladder, the computer workstation converts to a two-seater dining area, and “tables and surfaces seem to come out of the woodwork on demand as needed”. Indeed, space-saving innovations are a distinguishing feature of tiny houses.

It might sound like a competition to out-tiny your neighbour, but the Small House Movement welcomes dwellings of all sizes and maintains that small is relative. “A space that might be considered small for a family of four would be large if only a single person were living in it,” says the Society.

Shay Salomon is open about the fact that living in a tiny house presents challenges, including the need to tidy more often. But she says the financial, emotional, environmental and health benefits of living in a small house outweigh the obstacles.

Coming back to the idea of slow food, Shay offers the last word on small living. “Sustainability is a question of sustenance. When you can get in touch with the reality around you, you realise there’s plenty of sustenance for everyone, and the sustainable way of doing things is to feed the whole world just exactly what it needs, and not too much.”

Small houses online
www.resourcesforlife.com/small-house-society
The online hub of the Small House Society is a focal point for the movement and offers a wealth of resources for smaller, more sustainable living.

www.susanka.com
Architect Susan Susanka’s The Not So Big House, published in 1998, is considered a seminal text of the Small House movement. Her website includes a book shop, home plans for sale, presentations and more.

www.tumbleweedhouses.com
Jay Shafer’s website includes home plans, a book shop, his blog and FAQ.

www.tinyhouseblog.com
Based in the USA, this website has a good online book shop with many Small House related titles.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZM2G-PfEbc
This four-minute film about Dee Williams, who built and lives in her own tiny house on wheels, was considered so inspiring that Yahoo posted it on their home page.

www.tinyhouseforum.com
Free-ranging discussion about tiny houses and simple living.

www.smalllivingjournal.com
A bi-weekly webzine about small living, including a useful blogroll.

www.jaystinyhouse.com
Justin Peer’s blog details the process of building his tiny house in a London backyard. Justin’s effort is notable also for the fact that he’s sourcing most of his materials second-hand from eBay, dumpsters and other salvage spots.

Size matters

From Sanctuary magazine issue 9. Buy or subscribe.

By Jenny Brown

Officially, we reached the zenith of the Big House trend when the real estate boom was at its height in 2006, with new houses reaching an average of 240 square metres. These were homes, according to economists Clive Hamilton and Dr Richard Denniss, authors of the 2005 study Affluenza, “with more space than the residents can actually use”.

The 21 century lifestyle gave everyone a taste “for their own space”. In the last 15 years, says Dr Denniss, “the average Australian home is bigger by one bedroom”. Or more. Add to the extra bedroom a rumpus room, a study, an ensuite or two and a dedicated entertainment room, and Australia’s new housing stock has taken on board an extra 50 square metres since 1986.

Over the same period, the average household shrunk from 2.9 people to 2.5.

“The more-space trend was associated with a period of strong household economic growth,” says Harley Dale, chief economist with the Housing Industry Association (HIA). The expansion of houses tracked almost exactly the long boom of 1996 to 2008 when, with the great reality check known as the Global Financial Crisis, householders were forced to take stock of their spending.

At the same time, the subdivisioned blocks offered by developers were getting smaller. “The average residential block size,” says Mr Dale, “used to be 700 to 900 square metres”. Today it is likely to be 450 square metres.

What is surprising is how long it took before the smaller block sizes began putting pressure on house sizes. Instead, as many social commentators have noted, the yard shrunk. The reason? We wanted “more space for more homebased activities,” says Mr Dale.

Richard Denniss explains it differently. He sees “an increasing tension between builders and property developers to make the most money they can with big houses on smaller blocks”. Whatever was behind the bigger house trend, the reality is that we reached a point where no more house could be squeezed out of the equation. Says Mr Dale, “we have completed the scaling up phase to four bedrooms and two bathrooms, and we probably won’t go to a standard five bedrooms”.

Hitherto, the Big House trend has been largely driven by an Australian mindset that sees residential investment as a fundamental money store. “It’s part of our culture that we like home ownership. We’re owners rather than renters,” says Mr Dale, “so in one sense it is where we are storing our money”. The rise in house prices has been more than generously upholding this belief for the best part of two decades. Richard Denniss says the property market has been right on trend in those decades, “selling the benefits of investing in bigger houses. And the consumers haven’t been reflecting on the costs in terms of building, furnishing and running these places.”

The rising running costs of bigger houses have had serious environmental consequences. Today, 95 per cent of Australia’s current housing stock – big or small – operates on or below a 2.5 star energy rating. According to a study by Professor Peter W Newton of Melbourne’s Swinburne University, our seven million separate or medium density dwellings account for 12 per cent of Australia’s total energy consumption.

Due in part to our penchant for big houses, our residential carbon footprint is three to four times the global average.

In his study Hybrid Buildings: Pathways to Greenhouse Mitigation in the Housing Sector, Professor Newton sees the housing sector as having the most potential for achieving carbon neutral results in built environments.

But with “the housing industry…historically resistant to innovation” he believes it will come down “to government policy forcing their hand”. By instituting energy ratings to at least a seven star basis rate, he says “there would be a 75 per cent saving in heating and cooling per detached dwelling”.

Another key recommendation in his report is to reduce house sizes. “If,” writes Professor Newton, “there were a revision to a simpler style of living with floor space akin to the house of a quarter of a century ago (167 square metres), the average saving would be one tonne of carbon emissions per dwelling per year”.

That’s around a 10 per cent saving per household.

Life after the Big House
For the short to medium term, Richard Denniss is not optimistic. Big houses, he believes, are an integral part of the Great Australian Dream. It will take a lot of time and a good deal of regulatory pressure before we’re weaned off our supersized lifestyles.

In the US, on the other hand, pressure on available land is prompting the beginning of what appears to be a rationalisation of house sizes.

American-based architect and writer Sarah Susanka kicked off the debate in 1998 with her bestseller The Not So Big House in which advocated quality over quantity. “Build better, not bigger,” she wrote.

Apart from restoring human proportions to our domiciles, she says, “scale is the first consideration of sustainability”.

Susanka hit onto something. Her subsequent eight books have all been best sellers. A movement was born. Leading the way in the US is the Small House Society (www.resourcesforlife. com/small-house-society), which claims to have had an amazing growth in interest in the last few years. (See article on p24.)

How small is big enough?
Although he is keen to promote smaller, more energy-efficient housing, Adelaide architect John Maitland of Energy Architecture argues there is some requirement for a sense of “wasted space” in a home.

“We do need a little bit of space to feel comfortable. The sense of a lack of compression is important to our psyches.”

We do need bedrooms that give some breathing room around a queen-sized bed. If they have generous windows they can borrow extra space from outside. And we need corridors that “aren’t uncomfortably narrow. If we don’t feel the sense of being able to spread our wings, houses can feel mean,” he says. “We don’t want to cut every corner.”

Mr Maitland says an entirely comfortable and energetically conservative home for the average 2.5 occupants could be 115 to 140 square metres. “That will do. But a lot of people feel squeezed – they do feel they need three bedrooms. So we do more 150 to 160 square metre houses.”

It’s a no-brainer that smaller houses cost less to build and run. Maitland’s experience tells him that with a now average $2500 build cost per square metre for a house with sustainability features, the smaller house will become the saner option.

“And people are starting to feel more comfortable and confident about building smaller.” One of his recent clients contracted their original “too voluminous” blueprints by 40 per cent and instantly cut the estimated $800,000 build budget in half.

“By halving the size and reshaping it, they ended up with the same amenity.” Rethinking residential scale, in any case, “is more interesting,” Maitland says. “People are starting to look at spending money on a contemporary house that is designed and furnished well – it’s no longer just about scale.”

Everything you ever wanted to know about sustainability rebates

From Sanctuary magazine issue 9. Buy or subscribe.

By David Sparkes

Trying to navigate your way through the labyrinth of government rebates for sustainable living is simply mind numbing. Water tanks, insulation, solar power, solar hot water – each has its own set of policies. To make matters worse, not only do you have to investigate what the federal government is offering, but also your state government. It’s enough to make your head spin.

The federal government has made a laudable effort to cut through the jargon and explain things straightforwardly with www.LivingGreener.gov.au. That site, combined with the Alternative Technology Association (ATA) rebates page, has helped to make researching rebates online a lot easier.

But let’s face it, there’s nothing like a dumbed down, print-and-paper primer. So if you’re investigating installing solar power, solar hot water, insulation, tanks or a greywater system, this is the place to start.

Small talk with Andrew Maynard

From Sanctuary magazine issue 9. Buy or subscribe.

In this issue, which explores and celebrates the small house, we wanted to challenge a few notions about what constitutes sustainable architecture.

One little talked about approach to sustainable design is “kinetic architecture”, a school of multifunction design. To illustrate how it works, we chose to profile one of its leading practitioners – an architect whose design ethic is challenging some of the received notions of sustainable architecture in Australia.

Andrew Maynard’s Melbourne-based practice has built its reputation on a suite of buildings informed by social, political and environmental concerns. His conceptual work is paradigm-busting, and ranges from a suburb-eating robot; a novel take on the mobile home that challenges our notion of the “fixed address”; and a Styx Valley protest shelter, informed by Andrew’s upbringing in “the forests of Tasmania”.

Maynard’s built works are invariably meditations on these same concerns, while at the same time deeply grounded in site-specific solutions. His designs are compact, well-crafted and unpretentiously progressive. At their core is his rejection of stolid, unchanging spaces in favour of nimble, multi-purpose ones.

While Andrew’s designs may follow climate-responsive design principles, such as good orientation and the inclusion of concrete floors for thermal mass, Andrew sees these principles as a given of good design, rather than the exclusive preserve of sustainable architecture. Nor is the inclusion of, quote, “green gadgets”, such as solar panels or solar hot water, a necessary corollary of virtuous design. Sometimes, he says, they can obscure bad design and act as a type of green washing.

“I don’t subscribe to the idea that you can demolish a perfectly good house to put up a four-bedroom six-star house, add a solar array and a few other ‘green gadgets’ and call it sustainable. Or that you can add a ‘green’ extension to an existing dwelling that is perfectly big enough, and call it sustainable.”

For Andrew, one of the main battles is “trying to talk clients out of adding extra rooms.

“Most clients say that their current spaces aren’t working for them. The status quo solution in Australia is to add more rooms or to knock it down and start again. Australians are addicted to renovations and extensions.”

What Andrew would like to see is architects producing architecture that responds to the changing needs of clients by creating adaptable spaces. He wants extensions and rebuilding considered only as a last resort, instead of the first.

A recent example of Andrew’s work is a home in beachside Anglesea, Victoria. During the briefing process everything was on the table, from rebuilding from the ground up to adding a large extension with extra bedrooms. Eventually these were rejected as neither sustainable nor cost-effective solutions.

Subsequently, plans for an additional bedroom for grandchildren were scaled back to a slimline single-bed bunk room. Another dual-function space – a new living room by the back yard – was designed to convert to a guest room, vastly improving the liveability of the home with a simple, modestly sized gesture.

Kids being kids, the bunk room has had the additional benefit of being a very popular cubby-hole.

Thinking small when you have a roomy rural block runs against the grain for many people, but on most inner-suburban blocks it’s a simple necessity. In the inner-suburbs, therefore, the pursuit of maximal house size is leading people to build on every square metre, which means that gardens are becoming a thing of the past, while courtyards and balconies are the new norm. Andrew’s recent work on an inner-Melbourne terrace allowed him to challenge this trend.

Victorian terraces are notoriously light-starved and cramped, with a series of rooms running off a dark hallway and the toilet and laundry facilities at the back of the house, fronting the yard. The common solution is to add a living-kitchen-dining extension that opens onto the yard, but eats into it. Andrew’s approach was different and novel.

Firstly, he resolved to work within the existing size and fabric of the house – no extension – and realign the living space to foster family life. Then he set about designing creative furnishing and space solutions to maximise the existing space.

If there was one design feature that sums up Andrew’s work best it would probably be the kitchen island he designed for this home. It beautifully illustrates what Andrew sets out to achieve in each project: a unique solution that is both functional and elegant, engendering sustainability through compact design, and fostering social cohesion by bringing the family together.

When clients lay out plans for a kitchen-living area, many decide they need a separate work bench, space for dining table and chairs, storage cupboards and so on, then go about designing a huge kitchen and living area to fit in all these elements. In this design solution, Andrew combines all these elements into a custom-designed kitchen island bench. Combining prep area and cupboard, it also has a lower-level workspace where the children can draw or do their homework in the company of their parents. And at meal times it becomes the dining table, where the family can catch up on the day’s activities.

This home also beautifully illustrates Andrew’s work with kinetic architecture. The garden-facing laundry and bathroom were converted into a multifunctional space that is easily adapted to suit the needs of the clients. Primarily a living space and play room, when guests stay it can be turned into a bedroom with an inexpensive, built-in fold-out bed.

Andrew’s views about the future of building are characteristically honest. “At the moment we tend to rely on increased consumption to solve our problems, which is illogical. We really need to ask ourselves whether we need to change ourselves and our habits before blaming the spaces we currently occupy.

“If a renovation, extension or new build is necessary, then think small and think strategic. Never confuse small with cheap. It’s better to get a budget and spend it on something small that is designed extremely well than use the same budget spread thinly over a large area that performs badly.”

Sustainable prefab

From Sanctuary magazine issue 9.

It’s over 100 years since the first Model T rolled off the conveyor belt, but only recently since factory-assembled houses started making a splash.

To many the logic of prefab is inescapable. Mass produce a car in a factory and it is bound to be less costly and wasteful than building a unique model in your driveway. Wouldn’t the same argument apply to a house?

Architect Andrew Maynard (article) summed up the argument in a submission to the Vicurban Affordable Home Design Competition: “By far, what makes the most difference is the reduction in waste and energy that is possible through mass production, delivery, and offsite construction”.

Perhaps surprisingly then, one of the perceived benefits of prefab housing – lower cost – does not apply when it comes to sustainable building. Yes, if your idea of prefab is a plastic-clad mobile home without wheels, but definitely not if you insist on superior environmental design and materials. Sustainable prefab is not a cheaper alternative to sustainable site-built, but arguably it does offer better value for money.

The payoff for all forms of sustainable building comes with a tightly sealed, passively designed, efficiently functioning house. This leads to better environmental outcomes and lower operational costs. However the quality control inherent to sustainable prefab means you have a better guarantee of an environmentally sound house than you have with sustainable site-built.

One drawback of prefab is its lack of thermal mass. A site-built house that employs passive solar design with concrete slab floor or rammed earth wall will retain winter warmth and summer cool much better than a house which doesn’t have those things. Quality prefab partly compensates for this with extra insulation, but it’s something that must be borne in mind.

One way around prefab’s lack of thermal mass is to build or retain a massive (that is, weighty, high thermal mass) element on-site and couple prefabricated modular elements with it.

On the other hand, if you think you can live without the thermal mass, there is a lot to like about a house that employs a deep pile foundation as opposed to a shallow slab foundation. One touches the earth lightly, the other does not.

In Australia we still seem to equate prefab with cheap holiday homes. It’s time we did away with that image. Ecoshelta’s pod design (article) looks just as at home in inner-suburban Sydney as it does on Flinders Island. Modscape’s “overdesigned” steel-framed modules (article) are strong enough to stack seven storeys high, meaning they could easily become a steel-framed block of flats. Sustainable prefab is here to stay. Hopefully we’ll be seeing more of it in our cities. This is definitely not the last you’ll see of it in Sanctuary.

Treetop vantage

This is an excerpt from an article in Sanctuary magazine issue 8.

The steep banks of a winter creek and billabong, dotted with massive river red gums and kangaroo wattle, provided the inspiration for a South Australian couple’s new home. But they got more than they bargained for.

“We never thought we would be out over the creek!”

“We chose a site with a view of the magnificent gum tree near the billabong and thought Max would perch us on top of the bank. But that site is south-facing, so our architect swung us right around and across a gully!”

Having settled on the best site, Pritchard designed an economic and efficient house to comply with the couple’s tight budget. At only 110m2, the house comprises one bedroom, an open plan living area and kitchen and a home office that doubles as a guest bedroom. A second shed acts as the “spare room” for storage of golf clubs, fishing gear and other useful equipment.

The long narrow plan boasts large double-glazed windows on the northern and southern facades that make the most of the stunning views and enhance thermal performance. In summer, the glass on the northern side is protected by angled and perforated screens that keep the sun out, while cross ventilation and ceiling fans assist with cooling. During winter, the perforated screens allow the lower-angled sun to enter the house to warm the insulated concrete slab, which re-radiates warmth at night. It is supplemented by a small combustion heater that burns wood collected from the property.

The house is not connected to mains water so three tanks collect rainwater from the roof and the roofs of the two sheds, while a sewerage system treats waste water before it is dispersed into the landscape, away from the creek.

By far the most innovative aspect of the design is the lightweight structure that touches the ground at just four anchor points, minimising disruption to the creek bed while hovering above the watercourse. While Pritchard had every confidence his remarkable design could be built, he wasn’t sure the local council would approve the unusual dwelling.

“Council approval is a concern with any project you do, but we knew from the start that this would be a long process,” he says. “We thought it was worth a go, and in fact, the council said that it likes to encourage innovative design.” It took the couple about one year to satisfy all of the local and state government approval requirements – including demonstrating that the house was above the 100-year flood zone and wouldn’t impede water flow in the creek bed – but the final result was more than worth the effort.

“We’ve been here 18 months now and we are living in a magical spot,” the owner says. “When we were building it, I sometimes thought: ‘I could be living there already if I’d just plopped a McMansion in the paddock!” she laughs. “But then I’d remind myself that it’s a special spot and it deserves a special house.

“We love the birds and we feel like we’re in our own little nest watching them in their nests,” she adds. “We watch them tending to their young in boxes we made for them and it’s like living in our own bit of nature. While this is a very narrow house – and I was worried about that before it was finished – it feels so open because of the bush all around us.”

“As well, we love that people still say ‘wow’ when they come here for the first time. We hope that we don’t ever lose that sense of wonder ourselves.”

Sash windows

This is an excerpt from an article in Sanctuary magazine issue 7.

The panels on the old double-hung sash windows are a common source of draughts, and their thin glazing is an insulation disaster – but replace them with something modern that’s out of character and you could be stripping thousands off your resale value.

It’s also important not to underestimate the environmental benefits of retaining your old windows. Replacing old features entails waste – unless you recycle in which case you’re merely trusting that someone else will adopt the “inefficient” technology you discarded. It also means installing a new window, whose embodied energy, the energy invested in its manufacture, transport etc, will offset its efficiencies for some time.

And old windows are not as inefficient as all that. As Paul Downton, principal architect of Ecopolis Architects, points out, “old sash windows provide very good controllable ventilation options that other windows do not”.

Sash windows are notoriously tricky to upgrade. There’s no point even looking at glazing solutions until you’ve sealed your window’s draughts, and while there are a range of draft-sealing solutions for sash windows opinions vary as to the effectiveness and appearance of each of them. ecoMaster make their own custom treatments, as do companies like Classic Windows and Sash Window Specialist.

Assuming you can seal your window against draughts, glazing treatments range from higher performing single glazing, to solar films, to discrete double-glazing substitutes such as Magnetite and Clear Comfort.

And yes, it is even possible to retrofit double glazing in old windows. “It’s a bit technical,” says Dick Clarke of Envirotecture, “but any competent carpenter can do it”.

Fireplaces

This is an excerpt from an article in Sanctuary magazine issue 7.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, many Victorian houses had their draughty and notoriously inefficient fireplaces sealed up and plastered over, cast-iron insert and all, as gas heaters found favour over wood fires.

This may have improved thermal efficiency, but it came at a cost to charm and heritage appeal. For all their problems, fireplaces with ornate surrounds are one of the principle features of a Victorian home. If you wish to keep or restore your fireplace, there are ways to do it energy-efficiently.

Ninety per cent of heat from a woodburning open fireplace goes up the chimney. Replacing your woodburning fire with a fireplace-fitted gas heater will be more efficient than a wood-burning fire, but a regular flued gas heater will still allow a draught up the flue. It will also burn oxygen from within the home, which may necessitate a wall vent (unventilated rooms with gas heaters are a serious hazard).

Maurice Beinat of Ecomaster recommends that “heaters should be fitted with a balance flue, also known as a power flue, which draws the air used for combustion from outside the home. These have no possibility of draught as the combustion chamber is fully isolated from the air within the home.”

When they’re not being used in winter, open fireplace flues should be sealed. Sealing a fireplace, says Andreas Sederof of Sunpower, “can be as simple as stuffing a hessian bag into the throat of the chimney or (for more control) having a damper fitted into the flue”. In summer you should keep your chimneys open, as they can act to vent hot air out of the house.

Rammed earth

This is an excerpt from an article in Sanctuary magazine issue 7.

Rammed earth is a precisely controlled mixture of gravel, clay, sand, cement, and sometimes lime or waterproofing additives. The contents are carefully proportioned and mixed, and then machine-compacted in removable formwork to yield a stone-like wall that is massive, water resistant, load bearing and long lasting.

One of the attractions of rammed earth is its low embodied energy. Most of the energy used in rammed earth is in quarrying and transportation. There is a slim possibility materials can be quarried on site, but generally they will have to be trucked in.

Though you can always tell a rammed earth wall, no two are ever the same. Colour and texture can be controlled during the ramming process, and features such as niches, embedded stones and leaves can be added.

Being a niche product, rammed earth sells at a premium over conventional building materials. But the highly customised qualities of rammed earth are what attracts people to it.

Rammed earth has a number of practical advantages. Tests by CSIRO have given it a four-hour fire resistance rating, which is very favourable. Rammed earth is also highly durable and moisture resistant. While you need to prevent continued exposure to water at the top and bottom of walls – just as with clay brick – most Australian rammed earth walls do not require additional waterproofing. Which is just as well, because the breathability, non-toxicity and naturalness of rammed earth are some of its main attractions.

Mass, beautiful mass

Rammed earth is particularly renowned for its thermal mass, which is its ability to store heat then release it hours later.

When there’s a big difference between outside and inside temperatures, and daytime and nighttime temperatures, thermal mass can give you heat when you want it and store it when you don’t. It’s called thermal lag, and rammed earth will give you a thermal lag of about 12 hours. Perfect for levelling out day and night. But beware, to get the best out of rammed earth you have to know how to build with it. Poorly installed, it will radiate heat all night during summer and absorb the heat you produce at night in winter.

The mass/insulation paradox

Materials with high thermal mass are not good insulators – they don’t stop heat, they just slow its flow. And that is the main drawback of rammed earth. Even though it has low embodied energy and excellent thermal mass, its R value – the measure of its insulating qualities, crucial for a home’s energy rating – is low.

However with appropriate passive solar design, rammed earth can achieve comfort conditions in every one of Australia’s climactic zones.