Environmentally Friendly Homes

Your home site may be less than ideal but that doesn't mean you have to resign yourself to anything less than the home of your dreams. Smart builders and designers can work with seemingly impossible sites and turn them into architectural successes.

At Murrays Beach in Australia the housing community has been designed around the beaches and natural vegetation. Builders had to ensure that certain natural features were unharmed when the houses were constructed. Some creative building ideas had to be utilized such as minimal use of retaining walls or extensive cut and fill areas. Houses could be on piers and beams rather than large cut and filled slabs. The use of lightweight products such as those by James Hardie - in lieu of a brick walls and tile roof - helps the home blend into the natural environment of Murrays Beach.

A smart design turned a 139 square metre lot into a 289 square metre house. Design manager Peter Byfield from Greystone builders came up with an efficient and innovative design for a building design in Murrays Beach. Although the lot was 407 square metres, the building could only be built on an area of 139 square metres. As the developers, Stockland, had clearly defined parameters on each lot, to ensure that significant trees were left intact and enough outdoor living remained for the ultimate inhabitants.

Byfield achieved a 289 square metre-house by building three storeys over five split levels. Byfield said "The five levels were necessary given the slope of the land. This was an economical and efficient solution."

One of the key elements in achieving this was the use of lightweight materials. "Using the lightweight material allowed us cantilevered projections and helped achieve very large spans" says Byfield. The variety of lightweight materials gave Byfield the choice of different built forms - such as recessed panels, projecting panels and interesting roof lines. He used a mixture of these lightweight materials to make the house more appealing. Different vertical and horizontal cladding was used to scale down the visual mass of the building and stopped the house from appearing as one colossal structure, which stuck out.

Byfield believes that the same outcome might have been achieved with traditional building methods, but at a higher cost and a less attractive result. "If we had used materials such as timber cladding, future owners would need to be more diligent with maintenance in the future."

Links to check out for more information:
James Hardie, Light Weight Materials
Murrays Beach, Wallarah Peninsula

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