After 30 years of owning a Victorian terrace in Fitzroy as an investment property, Jenny Vizard was faced with a dilemma.
Needing a new home, she could either renovate the tired inner-city cottage and move in herself, or sell it and buy elsewhere.
I was apprehensive about renovating, but I had a sentimental attachment to the little house. So I felt it was a possibility that was worth investigating,” she said.
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The clients first approached our office looking to build a small sustainable home on a vacant property in Balnarring. Their initial idea was to build a one-bedroom courtyard home, which could be extended under stage two works to include two additional bedrooms. As concept design commenced the clients decided to carry out all building works under one contact.
They were after a home that was environmentally and socially sustainable. The building needed to be energy efficient and have excellent passive solar qualities and natural ventilation. The social aspect and the relationship to the landscape and outdoor space were important elements to consider in spatial planning. The house would predominantly be used by the couple, however needed to be flexible when their adult children came to stay.
We often hear about natural ventilation, natural light access, and thermal mass in housing design, but what do these really mean and entail? How do you implement this from a day to day operating level to a designing level (if you are planning or designing a new home)?
We have summarised a few tips from our research and conversations with Atlas Architects and Environmental Design Consultant Noy Hildebrand.
Building or renovating a home entails many exciting prospects and visions of your ideal spaces, catered specifically for your family lifestyle and taste. However, if you are not prepared and well informed, it could become a lengthy and costly process.
There are many pitfalls and unexpected obstacles in the building matrix. The process involves various permits, dispensations, budget management, finding and negotiating with a builder and the bittersweet process of construction where cost blowout and unforeseeable issues occur.
When Renata Brodecky decided to downsize from her five-bedroom, double-storey house in Bentleigh, she never anticipated she’d be able to build her dream home on the same plot of land.
Having spent 45 years in the south-eastern Melbourne suburb, all of Renata’s friends and family were close by. She didn’t want to move to a different area, but no nearby properties suited her taste or needs. That’s when she decided to build her ideal home on the same plot. But Renata was adamant she didn’t want to demolish her original home.
“I feel proud that we didn’t demolish the existing home,” Renata says. “I built that home 30 years ago and still today it is a great house. It would have been wasteful to demolish the existing house when it still has many good years left in it.”
While building a dream home is an exciting and rewarding process, preparing a realistic budget for a project is no simple task due to the inherent variability of the design and construction process. As a result, effective budgeting is often undervalued, much to the detriment of the final built outcome.
In this post, we have outlined three primary categories of expenses associated with procurement, as well as recommended measures to pre-empt and control these. From our experience, these are invaluable steps that a client can employ to make the procurement process more enjoyable, affordable, and successful.
We enjoyed our time chatting with Laurence Dragomir from urban.com.au and are excited to be featured on their weekly podcast. We discussed the trials and tribulations of starting an architectural office, and some of the things that we’ve learned along the way.
The podcast can be accessed through this link.
On a recent trip to America, we collated photos of some of our favourite buildings and spaces that we visited.
For some, life in a rural setting is what dreams are made of. Whether it is relocating your home to the country side, or a weekend getaway to escape the city hustle, the beautiful landscapes of rural Victoria are undeniably attractive.
These dreams of relocation are often accompanied by desires to build or renovate a home. However, many people overlook that rural properties are commonly designated as bushfire prone areas. If you would like to build or renovate a home in a bushfire prone area, it is vital to understand some of the stringent construction requirements to avoid costly additional expenses.
