Category Build

Rob Scott and his family of five own a 180 hectare organic farm in the Macedon Ranges, just outside of Melbourne, Victoria. The family has a huge passion for organic farming, permaculture, animal husbandry, alternative building and holistic living. Rob started out building ‘tiny houses’ at the farm eight years ago as extra bedrooms for his children. He now runs workshops in tiny house building and builds custom designed tiny houses for clients.

What is a tiny house, and why do you build them?

A tiny house is a dwelling small enough to put on a trailer or a truck. I was always building cubby houses as a kid. And when our third child arrived we eventually needed another room. I had an old Dodge truck, and I thought building a room on that was the easiest option, out of necessity: no plans, no foundations.

Josh Byrne, presenter on ABC TV’s Gardening Australia, and his wife Kellie Maher began construction of their remarkable 10-star rated house in Hilton, near Fremantle, in November 2012. Construction of two dwellings on a little over a ‘quarter-acre’ (1012 m2) block was completed in June 2013. Josh, Kellie and their children Oliver and Caitlin live in the rear house, while another family lives in the front house. Both houses achieved a ten star Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS) rating, mainly due to their thermal performance, efficient power generation and use, and the largely self-sufficient water supply.

The minimum standard for all new houses built in WA, since May 2011, is six stars. Ratings are calculated considering the climate zone, location, dimensions of the dwelling and occupancy. A ten star rating is difficult to achieve. Besides maintaining a comfortable temperature all year round, without the need for air conditioning or additional heating, the construction is required to feature efficient insulation, as well as thermal mass, to hold heat and thus moderate variable temperatures often experienced in Australian houses. Window placement is another necessary consideration, to enable cooling breezes to enter when required, using windows that act like vents to extract warm air to surrounding areas.

When we bought our 1.2 hectares in Old Warburton, east of Melbourne, Victoria, our aim was to grow the majority of our vegetables and fruit, enabling us to eat fresh food in season and to preserve our requirements for the rest of the year. In recent years production reached our target. Quality, quantities and food miles were under control, but storage became an issue. We had been using the laundry cupboards, supplemented by recycled cupboards removed from an old house, for storage.

We needed a coolroom: a space designed to store fresh and processed products to eat later. We selected a site under the existing insulated back verandah, incorporating an existing light fixture and using the thermal mass of the rear mudbrick wall of our ownerbuilt house. The walls of our coolroom are non-load bearing. The internal shelves are built sturdily.

Earthbag building (or ‘super adobe’) is a technique credited to Nader Khalili, an Iranian-born architect and humanitarian. The technique uses polypropylene bag (the kind of bag your chook food comes in, before it is cut into lengths) as a continuous, flexible form to hold courses of earth, building up a structure layer by layer. Rendering weatherproofs the structure, and is the final binding mechanism holding the bags together.

Earthbag building is great where we are in Central Australia, as there seems to be no shortage of soils with a reasonable sand/clay mix, and there’s not much else to build with. Sure, you need to buy the bag, barbed wire and rendering materials; but the bulk of what you’re building with can often be sourced from your site, and moved with the aid of little more than a shovel and wheelbarrow. Along with being cheap and simple, earthbag building is also tough, flexible and provides good thermal mass – enough reasons for us to give it a go!

Resilience means the ability to adapt and respond positively to challenge and change. Small villages have been the most enduring form of human settlement across continents and across centuries and presumably will continue to be so in a future filled with uncertainty around issues such as climate change, rising energy prices, food supply and job security.

The founders of Atamai Village in New Zealand have responded to meet such challenges collectively, by focusing their energies on developing a resilient community – a sustainable ecovillage. Atamai Village is a modern example of a traditional village, with new approaches and technologies designed to adapt as required.

Atamai Village is purpose built to provide the best possible response to living well under the various challenges to the global economic system that are already in evidence. The permaculture-based settlement was founded in 2006, and is now home to about twenty households. On completion it will include about fifty households, as well as extensive common lands. In addition to private purchase, a co-housing option is being developed for greater affordability.

Whether you are a gardener with a passion for compost making, or a child who has felt the warmth of a pile of grass clippings, you will be familiar with the heat created by decomposing material. Our aim is to capture and use this heat to create hot showers.

A few years ago we were inspired by Jean Pain’s compost hot-water system and, as we frequently have extra people on the farm (particularly during our two week live-in PDCs), we needed another shower with good hot water. So began our compost-powered shower journey.

Hot showers for all

Since our original trial we have made about a dozen compost heaps to power showers, the best of which gave us five months of continuous hot water. It is joy to stand under a warm shower knowing you are benefitting from the energy and compost cycle, and watching the run-off flow onto the citrus.

HG Eco-logic Constructions is about building quality and beautiful homes that work for our clients, the people who will live in them. Our focus is on creating a climate – in both house and site – that is comfortable, and is achieved through passive energy and efficient design.

We have a team of designers and tradespeople committed to creating quality energy efficient houses that complement the landscape.

What is the main philosophy behind your building work?

The main philosophy is to build and integrate a quality home into the environment, with the aim of reducing energy consumption through design, construction and landscaping.

When Sunny Wilder (architect) and Nicholas Coyle (furniture designer/maker) moved their thriving timber furniture making business from Melbourne to Pambula, on the far south coast of NSW, they wanted to build a house that combined their skills and included a lot of storage. ‘We have always liked the idea of prefabricated houses, but have seen that they are limited by their size and scale if they are the type that arrive fully finished on the back of a truck. Most prefabricated houses of this type also require easy site access and crane hire, which is not always suitable for tight urban spaces or remote areas. And prefabricated houses usually lack the timber detailing, warmth and individuality of an architecturally designed house’, says Sunny.

Many of the original followers of permaculture left the city and became owner-builders on far-flung blocks of land; creating lives for themselves which were free of debt; allowing them to focus their time and energy on what they felt was important. Land was still cheap up to the late 1990s. Building regulations were minimal and, with help from local LETSystems and keen WWOOFers, many young families built their homes without having to rely on banks for a mortgage.

The children of these families are now young adults, and it is a very different world they face when it comes to choice in housing. Land is much more expensive, making saving for a deposit almost impossible. Building regulations have escalated, adding to costs. And major banks are hostile to lending to owner-builders.

To get a house, most young people feel that the only option is to hitch up with someone else with a steady job, buy a house by borrowing $100 000s from a bank, and then stay in a job they may hate for the next twenty-five years. Starting a family along the way is challenging. They may lose their sense of freedom, and become extremely vulnerable to fluctuating interest rates in the global marketplace. Meanwhile climate change and resource depletion loom.

However, there are some other options for people looking to live with minimal or no debt.

Our kids love the bright orange and yellow house we’ve built: of course – they helped design it, and chose the colours! Ecovillage homes don’t have to be in muted tones of forest green and mission brown.

Nature abounds with colour and beauty, and our permaculture garden is filled with these. These are reflected by bold splashes of colour on the walls that bring a fun, happy, positive feeling to the spaces in and around our home, and reflect a lively glow into our rooms, making a great living and learning space. We’ve been building our house at Crystal Waters Eco Village, near Maleny in Queensland, for just over a decade.