Eco-elegance
This is an excerpt from an article in Sanctuary magazine issue 5.
Designing a new home for your in-laws could be a nightmare job. For Mario Dreosti, however, it was a real marriage of interests and skills that produced a stunning design with a focus on the future and plenty of “wow factor”.
As well as delivering the environmental features wanted by his parents-in-law, Peter and Sandy Dobson, Mario also brought to the design his knowledge and expertise as one of Adelaide’s leading aged-care architects to ensure the house can be adapted as its owners age. His wife, interior designer Annabel Dobson, added to the creative mix.
“The brief was very much a functional one,” says Mario, who works for Adelaide architecture firm Brown Falconer. With the family long grown up, Sandy and Peter wanted to move from a much bigger established house to a courtyard living environment and, after years of searching, found a site in the leafy, heritage-laden inner suburb of Unley.
They wanted elements of the grandeur and entertaining capacity of the old house, and a design that suited their new neighbourhood, but also to be more responsible in how they constructed it, “without it looking like an eco-house”.
“It was not going to require a lot of human intervention, to open and shut windows and doors and so on,” Mario recalls of the planning. “It was to be fully automated, slick, and smart and modern—but with the edge taken off some of the (environmental) burden.
“What we’ve done, we believe, is produce a contemporary town home that provides all of that—a bit of the glam factor and the comforts of a house of this style, but one which has key active environmental aspects and—through fairly subtle and passive considerations—provides a whole-of-life adaptable house for them, for now and into the distant future.”
First up, the home offers a spectacular entrance, with the ceilings stepping upwards through the hallway to the heart of the home to give a great sense of space, light, and welcome. And it has all the top-end features you could want: hi-tech data wiring, fully ducted reverse-cycle airconditioner (zoned to individual rooms), a wine cellar and a study.
But there are also plenty of lower-tech solutions that come simply out of smart design, like the extensive use of natural light and ventilation, solar orientation, and glazing, a practical but stylish garden, and even the retention of a well-placed beech tree that protects the master bedroom from most of the summer heat.
In fact the first major environmental feature of the home goes all but unnoticed. Only two small hatches in the driveway at the front of the house hint at the two pre-cast concrete rainwater tanks that are buried next to each other underneath, giving a 38,000 litre capacity.
From there, the whole site has been transformed, with the previous two-storey 1950s infill house knocked down. “We started the process looking to reuse the built form, but it really wasn’t on a scale to reference anything else in the neighbourhood,” Mario says. An existing rear studio, however, was kept and fits in well.
