Close-knit community, increased sociability, playmates aplenty – the benefits of pocket neighbourhoods are many.

Words Paul Downton

Between the standalone privacy of a dwelling on its own block and the communal aspirations of co-housing lies a balance that more and more people are seeking.

The movement towards co-housing, intentional communities and more neighbourly development has been happening for decades – it is no accident that the scale of the tribe, the village and the neighbourhood are so similar.

“Pocket neighbourhood” is a term coined by US architect Ross Chapin to describe a style of development that taps into that deep-felt need for community. These developments can be in urban, suburban or rural areas but they all echo a pattern of life common to traditional communities around the world; Chapin calls them “neighbourhoods within neighbourhoods”.

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Small, tiny, micro – many ways to describe a movement which is becoming too big to ignore.

Words Verity Campbell

Several issues ago, in Sanctuary 9, we looked at the US-based Small House Movement. Born from an increasing desire to radically shift the way we live, Jay Shafer and Gregory Paul Johnson trail blazed a movement designed to give people the tools and support they need to replace “trophy” houses with homes that better suit their needs, improving quality of life and freeing up time and money. According to the Small House Society, “It’s not a movement about people claiming to be ‘tinier than thou’ but rather people making their own choices towards simpler and smaller living, however they feel best fits their lives”.

Small homes use fewer resources and are filled with less stuff. Small homes increase urban density. Small homes are more affordable. Small homes make paring down a necessity. After reading in Collaborative Consumption (reviewed on p10) that the average drill is used “somewhere between six and 13 minutes in its entire lifetime”, I began to look around my home: camping and ski gear, juicer, dust-gathering books, two drills! So many things that are rarely used. Creative online distribution models such as the Sharehood (www.thesharehood.org) make these items available as a shared community resource, while websites like Ziilch (au.ziilch.com) and Freecycle (www.freecycle.org) facilitate passing on unwanted items.

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Sanctuary subscribers Wade and April want their planned new home in Geraldton, WA, to take advantage of great sea views, be energy efficient and stay cool naturally. Sven Maxa of Maxa Design gives them some design tips.

“April and I have always been fortunate to live close enough to the coast to enjoy it as a regular part of our lifestyle,” says Wade. “The land we’ve bought to build our family home on fronts the beach where I learnt to surf. Although we will be downsizing in both house size and outdoor play area, having the beach and a lovely grassed coastal strip next to us to the west will provide a great nature playground for our two girls.

“We are aiming for a house that is as sustainable as possible, with on-site greywater treatment and wind and solar power. It gets hot in Geraldton – we often have periods of temperatures in the mid 30s to low 40s [degrees Celsius]. We’d like our house to stay cool and “wash out” the heat it has accumulated during the day effectively. Our location and climate is such that we would prioritise natural cooling over natural heating.”

Working to their brief, Wade and April’s local architect Jennifer Hurley of Hurley Architecture & Planning has designed a two-storey house that includes living areas and an undercover alfresco area downstairs facing the sea, and a versatile activity area and bedrooms for the girls upstairs.

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Heat conducted into or out of your home by frames, fixings and building materials can have a dramatic effect on its energy efficiency. The good news is that this thermal bridging can be avoided by careful design.

Words Paul Downton

Thermal bridging is what happens when fixings, frames or materials conduct heat through the skin of a building where it should be insulated. A thermal break is a construction element designed to prevent thermal bridging. Thermal bridges and breaks have long been recognised as critical to energy efficient design, but Australian domestic construction has only recently begun to pay them proper attention.

Many houses still lack the sort of detailing that takes “bridges and breaks” into consideration. If your home was built before insulation was required by the building code, it may not have sufficient insulation and thermal bridges are very likely.

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Open-plan living has many benefits, but also potential drawbacks in loss of control over noise, heating and cooling, says building designer Dick Clarke.

Words Dick Clarke

If there’s one idea that has permeated contemporary home design more than any other, it would be “open plan”. Open-plan living has many tangible benefits, but also some serious drawbacks if not done well. Combined living, kitchen and dining areas should be no larger than 70 or 80 square metres – any bigger and things get out of control. It’s reasonably well known that houses with large living areas and circulation spaces which connect the house from one end to the other have poor thermal control, but if they have lots of exposed thermal mass inside, such as concrete floors and masonry walls, they may also have extremely poor acoustics.

The concept of open-plan living comes from our love of big living areas with plenty of light, where all household activities happen in close proximity. This is in stark contrast to houses built before the 1950s, where kitchen, lounge and dining activities each had their own separate room, quite disconnected from the rest, and certainly disconnected from the outside world. During the 1950s and 1960s, lounge and dining often came together in one larger space, with direct access to the kitchen. Then during the 1970s the kitchen was liberated from its second-class status, freed from isolation and brought joyfully into the core of the household.

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The Building Designers Association of Victoria (BDAV) recently set its members a challenge to compete for the best 10-star home design award. Tim Adams takes a look at the competition entries.

Words Tim Adams

The Building Designers Association of Victoria (BDAV) 10-star Challenge was designed to encourage designers to strive for the holy grail of 10 stars. A 10-star home theoretically requires no active heating or cooling to maintain year round comfort. Through involvement in this competition we hoped building professionals would not only acquire the practical experience of designing a 10-star home, but that they would better know what it takes to arrive at cost effective seven, eight and nine star homes.

23 entries were received for the 10-star Challenge – an extremely pleasing response which illustrates the enthusiasm of the BDAV community. Entrant feedback showed that involvement was extremely rewarding. Those involved found their skills “stretched” in the process of designing a house “which is totally passive from a thermal comfort perspective”.

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LED lights have taken a huge leap into the mainstream in the last few years.

Words John Knox

We all know that incandescent lighting is inefficient – as a light source they make great heaters! But if you don’t like the light provided by fluorescent lighting – compact (CFL) or otherwise – or the delay in getting to full brightness is an issue, what are the alternatives?

You may have heard “light emitting diode” or LED mentioned as the new kid on the block in lighting. Well, they aren’t so new – they were initially developed in the 1950s and were first produced as products in 1962 – and you have been seeing them for years every time you stop at a set of traffic lights. They are used as traffic lights because they are energy efficient and long lasting, which reduces maintenance costs.

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The days of lead paint are long gone, but conventional paint can still contain nasties. Sarah Robertson explores the options for making your next painting project more environmentally friendly.

Words Sarah Robertson

You walk into a new home and the smell of freshly paint assaults you before you’ve even had time to admire the newly-coated walls. The deep red feature wall and off-white facing walls of the kitchen might look fantastic, but that lingering paint smell often may signify coatings that are harmful to your health and to the environment.

Paint is made of four key components: pigments, binders, solvents, and fillers or additives. Pigments, which give paint its colour, and binders, which form its protective film, are the solid components of paint. Solvents are the liquid component that allows for easy application, while additives are included in small quantities to bring other required properties to the paint.

Conventional paints contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that have been linked to health problems and air pollution, and whose deleterious effects are recognised by government bodies like CSIRO.

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Building this stylish self-contained studio behind a Sydney house actually increased the size of the backyard, as Rachael Bernstone discovered.

Words Rachael Bernstone
Photography Andy Baker

When the owner of this house in Sydney’s inner west approached architect Ben Giles, she wasn’t quite sure how to deal with the ad hoc outbuildings in her backyard. “I wanted to be rid of the eyesore which was the ramshackle collection of outhouses, and create something which would be fabulous to look at from the main house back balcony,” she said, “as well as something useful – a living space.”

Initially, Ben investigated keeping some of the buildings on the rear boundary, but the presence of asbestos and their poor quality ruled out that option. As he began exploring solutions that involved demolishing and rebuilding, the introduction of “granny flat” legislation – making it easier to erect secondary dwellings in NSW backyards – was a welcome bonus.

Under the new regulations, granny flats or self-contained secondary dwellings should be no more than 60 square metres, a limitation that dictated the footprint for the new studio.

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This award-winning home demonstrates design for a comfortable lifestyle in the tropics – without air conditioning.

Words David Bridgman
Photography Peter Eve

Sitting comfortably on a stringybark bushland block south of Darwin, the airy steel-framed home of Geraldine Lee and Kristian Mortlock demonstrates just what is possible when architect and owner-builder share a common vision for passive design in the tropics.  Small by today’s standards at only 75 square metres plus a verandah, the house is a study in appropriate design for this region, with the emphasis firmly on passive cooling rather than the ubiquitous air conditioner. Indeed, this was part of the brief to the architect, Greg McNamara of Troppo Architects. “We were adamant we didn’t want air conditioning in the house,” Geraldine says. “We were looking for a naturally cooled house where we could live comfortably in the tropical environment.”

Keeping cool in the tropics is no easy task. Like the rest of the tropical north the region has two distinct seasons: a cool, pleasant, dry season from April to September; and a hotter wet season from October to March characterised by storms, monsoonal rainfall and the ever-present threat of tropical cyclones. To handle the climate, every opportunity has been taken to promote natural cooling in the house. The interior spaces soar to an impressive five metres above the floor, and shutters located at the peak of the raked ceilings can easily vent rising hot air.

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