An extension to a Melbourne brick terrace is highly sympathetic to the environment and the building’s heritage but adds a whole new dimension to this family home.

Words Sarah Robertson
Photography Nic Granleese

As you walk through Verity Campbell and Michael Day’s double storey terrace into their new kitchen and living room at the rear, the juxtaposition of old and new is striking – the green-flecked, black Dalsouple natural rubber floor is a clear contrast to the exposed brick wall that speaks of the change the 1870s-era building has seen. Like the extension, though, this contrast doesn’t seem out of place. Instead, it provides continuity, respecting the old and moving on to the new.

“We love it, we love it,” says Verity of the modest extension. “It’s transformed the house but it doesn’t feel wrong for the house, it’s still the same. I think because of this retained brick wall too, it’s still lived-in and intimate.”

Situated on a long thin block in Melbourne’s inner city suburb of Fitzroy North, it’s no surprise that the addition to the Campbell-Day home was designed to achieve high levels of environmental sustainability: both are former editors of Sanctuary. But for Verity and Michael, this was more than just a green refurbishment.

If you’d like to read the rest of this article you can buy this issue here.

The kitchen workhorse, the fridge-freezer, is getting more and more energy efficient: so much so that the star rating system recently needed recalibrating.

Refrigerators and freezers sold in Australia are required to meet minimum energy efficiency standards, and carry star rating labels to help you compare models. According to Sustainability Victoria, each extra star can save you around 20 per cent on energy use and therefore running costs. The rating system was regraded in 2010 and expanded to allow up to 10 stars for future products with exceptional efficiency; for now, the best-performing fridge-freezers carry 3.5 to 4 stars (around 5 stars in the old system). Remember to compare stars only across fridges of the same volume; you can also compare energy usage in kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, given on the rating label. All this rating information is available online too, at the Equipment Energy Efficiency website (www.energyrating.gov.au).

If you’d like to read the rest of this article you can buy this issue here.

Developed in Europe as “passivhaus”, the Passive House Standard is gaining popularity worldwide. New Zealand building designer and Passive House Consultant Glenn Murdoch explains how it can help produce energy efficient, healthy houses.

Words Glenn Murdoch

Everybody deserves to live in a healthy society. A society cannot be healthy unless its people are, and a fundamental requirement for this is that the buildings in which people live, work, play and learn are healthy.

A healthy building has many aspects; the one with the greatest impact on human health is indoor environmental quality. On average Australians spend about 90 per cent of their time indoors, so it is essential that it’s spent in a healthy environment. Even if you are outdoors most days, you still need to sleep in a healthy environment.

By applying the Passive House Standard to the buildings we design and build, we can guarantee that they will be perpetually comfortable, healthy, energy efficient, with excellent indoor air quality, extremely low running costs and a durable structure, as well as free from mould and damp.

The Passive House Standard is an international building energy performance code developed as “passivhaus” in Germany in the late 1980s. At the time the minimum building code standards in Germany were higher than those in Australia and New Zealand but were still considered inadequate. The Passive House Standard came out of a large research project and has subsequently been tested and verified to the point that it works in all climate zones.

If you’d like to read the rest of this article you can buy this issue here.

When it comes to thermal efficiency, reversing traditional brick veneer construction and putting the brick on the inside makes so much more sense. Dick Clarke explains why.

Words Dick Clarke

Reverse brick veneer (RBV) which, although self-explanatory when we think about it, has often caused people to do a double take: “Yes, that’s right, the bricks are on the inside of the wall… No, the plasterboard doesn’t get wet – it’s clad with… (whatever).”

In an RBV building, the brick layer is located within a protective external insulated skin. That skin can be made of pretty much anything that takes your fancy – but it must be well insulated to allow the thermal mass of the brick to do its job of regulating internal temperatures. (The brick layer can also be blocks, mud brick, rammed earth, or recycled concrete – so RBV is actually more correctly called Insulated Masonry Construction, but that name is nowhere near so well recognised or so much fun!)

We have to use the “reverse” in RBV because in the late 1950s somebody had the not-very-bright idea of replacing weatherboards and fibro on timber framed houses with a veneer of bricks (BV). “Brick veneerial disease” has since become the dominant building method in southern Australia, with people in the tropics generally avoiding its contagion. Many among us have come to assume that BV is normal brick, such that double-brick construction has come to be called “full brick”. This implies that brick veneer is “half brick”, perhaps “half as good”. This isn’t far off the money. It may save a coat of paint every 15 years or so, but costs a whole lot more than that.

If you’d like to read the rest of this article you can buy this issue here.

We take a look back at the benchtops we featured a few issues ago in Sanctuary 14, to remind you of the many eco options on the market.

The most popular choice of material for benchtops in recent decades, on the basis of its low cost and ease of maintenance, has been laminate: usually layers of resin-coated paper bonded to a plywood or MDF substrate. However, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are common in the bonding materials.

If you’d like to read the rest of this article you can buy this issue here.

Ovens are available in mind-boggling variety these days. Where once the choice was simply between gas and electric, built-in and freestanding, you can now opt for fan forced, multifunction, self-cleaning, steam cookers, microwaves with convection settings and more.

In Australia, ovens are not required to carry an energy rating label, making choosing an energy efficient model trickier. When shopping, ask for and try to compare energy consumption figures across models. (Some brands such as Miele and V-ZUG offer electric ovens with a European Standard “A” rating: a consumption of better than 0.99 kilowatt hours on the standardised test programme for a 60cm oven.)

If you’d like to read the rest of this article you can buy this issue here.

The best practice dishwashers currently on the market boast a 5.5-star rating for water efficiency and a 4-star energy rating. With canny use you can reduce your machine’s resource consumption even further.

Dishwashers come in a range of models and styles these days, from inbuilt and dish-drawer, to double drawer and slimline. Fortunately, dishwashers are both energy and water star rated, so it’s relatively easy to compare models.

Best practice models, in terms of energy efficiency, have a 4-star rating under the government’s Equipment Energy Efficiency scheme; you can compare dishwashers you may be considering for purchase at www.energyrating.gov.au.

If you’d like to read the rest of this article you can buy this issue here.

They look like conventional glass-topped ceramic electric hobs, but the technology behind induction cooktops is very different, and brings with it a range of efficiency and useability improvements.

Induction hobs are the fastest of all cooktop types for heating and cooking food – they can boil water in about half the time of conventional electric cooktops. They use a magnetic field to induce an electric current in your pot, causing it to heat up and cook the food within: in effect, the pot becomes the heating element. Induction cooktops have similar instant temperature control and yet are more energy efficient than gas burners, which can lose up to 60 per cent of their heat to the air. And thanks to the speed with which they heat the pot, induction models use less energy overall than standard electric cooktops. Despite the efficiency gain, running an induction hob can still be more emissions-intensive than gas, depending on the mix of sources used to generate electricity in your state. To ensure you’re cooking your soup with the lowest carbon emissions possible, go for 100 per cent GreenPower or otherwise ensure your electricity is renewably generated. See www.greenpower.gov.au for more information.

If you’d like to read the rest of this article you can buy this issue here.

Some kitchen taps on the market boast a 4-star water efficiency rating, but 4-stars is 2-stars shy of the most efficient taps available: 6-star.

Kitchen taps can discharge as much as 15 litres of water per minute so if you’re in the market for new tapware, the first thing you should look for is the Water Efficiency Labelling and Standards Scheme (WELS) rating of the tap. WELS is Australia’s water efficiency labelling scheme and each tap has a star rating; the more stars the better. The WELS database at www.waterrating.gov.au allows you to search for registered products and see their water flow and 10-yearly water consumption.

If you’d like to read the rest of this article you can buy this issue here.

In a place not known for its modest homes, a specialist landscaper is doing all he can to restore and rejuvenate the bush while creating a series of “treehouses” for his family.

Words Rachael Bernstone
Photography Simon Whitbread

When Mark Paul and his wife bought an old house on a large block in Palm Beach – holiday playground of Sydney’s rich and famous – they planned to use it as a weekender and eventually retire there. That was 14 years ago, and the couple have since had two children, now aged eight and 10. When the kids were younger, the Pauls found it was too much effort to decamp for the weekend, but now they are older the family is once again frequenting the northern beaches.

Mark trained and worked as a marine biologist before becoming a successful sailboard designer and maker. Towards the end of his sailboarding days he began exploring his passion for landscape design, particularly the creation of green walls and green roofs. His business The Greenwall Company, founded in 1997, is well known for its innovative no-soil planting of vertical and roof surfaces, which helps to extend the natural world within the built environment.

Mark was keen to apply those same principles to the Palm Beach property, a nearly-2000 square metre block with a 46 metre drop from its highest point to street level. “I was very keen to keep the tree canopy and improve on that by removing weeds and exotic trees from the site – which I replaced with indigenous species,” he says. “Because of the steep incline, the site needs to be kept well vegetated [to reduce erosion].”

If you’d like to read the rest of this article you can buy this issue here.