house design
Think thermal mass If possible, create areas of thermal mass in your home for no-cost cooling (after it’s installed of course). Thermal mass is any material – such as concrete or stone – that can absorb and store heat, taking a long time to heat up and to cool down. So in warm weather, thermal mass can help maintain a building’s cool.
Let it in/shut it out Learn to control temperatures by simply knowing when to open up your house for maximum air flow. On hot summer days, get into the habit of shutting up during the day – all doors, blinds, curtains – and then opening everything up in the evening to vent the house with evening breezes.
Madeleine Blanchfield Architects Save Email The living and dining area extend onto the balcony, which has custom-designed angled cedar blades that shroud the house and manage sunlight and privacy. The angle of the blades changes around the house depending on the view, and they are grouped together in bays to form big motorised louvre panels. “This means that, when it suits, the views can be fully opened up and the position of the louvre is flexible for different times of day,” says Blanchfield.
Skirt the issue Skirting boards have a practical job to do, concealing the gaps between floor and wall finishes and hiding uneven finishes. But they can add huge aesthetic impact too. A skirting board should add depth and continuity to your home, but unfortunately, most new homes these days are built with narrow, underwhelming trims. A wide skirting board immediately ramps up the quality factor in a room. MDF skirting is a popular and affordable option if you plan to paint your skirting board.
Passive design Passive design is an approach that takes advantage of the climate to maintain a comfortable temperature range within the home. This is achieved through the appropriate orientation of the house on its site to make the most of natural heating and cooling. House orientation is the key component to passive design, with spatial zoning, thermal mass, ventilation, insulation, shading and glazing also being contributing factors. It is a relatively simple strategy, intended to keep summer heat out and winter heat in, moderating the temperature of the home for comfort all year round. Passive design can be easily achieved with upfront thinking and planning during the design phase of a home build. The best bit is it’s free – this efficient design strategy relies solely on the sun and breezes to achieve thermal comfort within the home, with the added benefit of reducing the home’s operating energy costs over its lifespan.
Build up, not out As sites gets smaller, it’s not always possible to build out. Building up not only allows you to make the most of any views while maintaining a small footprint, but the verticality (both on exterior elevations and with high stud-heights internally) also adds to a sense of generosity.
Built-in furniture Window seats and built-in furniture allow the functional purpose of a room to be pushed to the edges of the space, so you’re able to utilise the full extent of the floor area. In our house, rather than a couch taking up space, the deep window seat provides cosy seating while leaving a wide expanse of floor for other uses.
2. Spaces that borrow space In the small house that I designed for my wife and I, the small footprint of the dining and living space is amplified and visually extended by borrowing space from other areas. Not only does the double-height space make the room feel much larger, but the unhampered view into the bedroom mezzanine and tucked-away kitchen both extend the edges of the room. Every room ‘borrows’ from another area, making it feel larger than its floor area would imply.
Bagnato advises against using black if you want to highlight the windows as a feature of the house, because they will disappear. The attractive timber cladding is allowed to be the star of this house, for example, thanks to the black-framed doors and windows.
The roof that follows the rules The shape of a home and its roof when in close proximity to a neighbouring boundary can sometimes dictate its shape. Regulatory controls may be such that the walls and the roof must be a certain height and setback from the boundary. This often leads the designer to create a form that not only follows these regulatory setbacks, but creates opportunities for the form to capture sunlight and sky views.
The roof for a location Location often plays a key role in the design of a home’s roof. Sandberg Schoffel Architects designed the form of this butterfly roof in a remote location to not only collect water via a central boxed gutter, but also to limit unnecessary gutters where leaves can collect and become an issue in this fire-sensitive bush setting.
and reveals On the other side of this Hobart house, the roof now chooses to reveal like open arms. A wall of glazing fills the contents of the wrap-around roof form to reveal the views beyond. The two contrasting ways the identical roof form is used heightens the experience for the visitor when first arriving at this home, termed the ‘Lookout House’ by its designers. See more of this house
The roof that encases … Upon arriving at this home in Hobart, Tasmania, by Room 11, you could be forgiven for believing that you are arriving at some sort of barn structure with a central entry door. Everything seems boarded up. However, it is more than that, as the sole window tantalisingly reveals. Here, the roof form in its simplistic design, like a child’s two dimensional representation of a house, encases the contents of the building, extending its shape down the sides of the home like two arms. The roof not only provides cover to the top of the building, but also to the sides.
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. Tinbeerwah House by Bark Design Architects. Noosa, Queensland
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The double-height living room was one of the Houzz community’s favourite photos of the project. The timber cladding, which features throughout the home, ties this space in with the surrounding bushland. Meanwhile, the polished concrete floor embedded with fly ash – a waste product of coal-fired power plants that makes the production of concrete more energy efficient – absorbs and stores the warmth of the winter sun, and gives the illusion of a sand-scattered surface.
6. Keeping up with the neighbours The residents of Spoonbill Street in Peregian Beach, Queensland, are involved in the local council’s Living Smart Homes program, and they all have one common goal: to protect the environment. The owners of this particular property asked Bark Design Architects to build a family home that blended into its surrounding natural environment. The result is a timber design, which fits in perfectly with the community’s eco-friendly ethos.
The home’s colour came later in the design process. The owners picked a nearly black colour called ‘Monument’, which then “spread like a virus through the rest of the house,” says Greg. He immediately was drawn to the hue, which he describes as “deep charcoal with a hint of chocolate”. The contrast of the black and natural wood is striking. Elkan says: “The main consideration was that black recedes into the landscape visually. If you look at a hillside with lots of houses, the ones that stand out are the light-coloured ones. The ones you don’t look at are the dark ones. Councils are trying to discourage the use of light colours for this reason and also because they reflect into neighbours’ houses.”
Fireplace: Morso 7648; floors: blackbutt wood with a tung oil finish, 30 per cent gloss Contemporary Living Room by Matt Elkan Architect Matt Elkan Architect Save Email “I was particularly impressed by the client’s desire to make sure that their daughters would be active participants in family life, and that the house should help to engineer this,” Elkan continues. Movable timber screens open to engage the TV room with the rest of the house.
The open living room encourages circulation of people, light and air. Louvred windows draw as much light and air in as possible. The house faces north, and ocean breezes blow in from the northeast. Elkan designed the roof overhang to shade the house during the summer and welcome in the sun in winter, when it’s lower in the sky. With the exception of ceiling fans, there is no active cooling. “With Sydney’s temperate climate, it should be easy to design a house where most of the heating and cooling is passive,” says Greg. By using natural forces for climate control, the home remains open to the world. They used low-emissivity glass on the windows and double glazing in many places, and they heavily insulated the building envelope to reduce the need for active heating. There’s a wood combustion stove for heating the living room and hydronic radiators throughout the house.
compact open plan
cottage
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