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Kitchens and bathrooms come in and out of fashion but the building envelope,
it's important that you get that really right. These buildings are expensive to build,
they cost the environment quite a lot ,so it's important that you build in a way that preserves
the building to pass on to the next generation. So Archier is really obsessed with how buildings
go together, how we might improve on the status quo, cause we believe there's a lot of value in
that space that's not tapped. My name is Chris Gilbert, I'm the director of design
at Archier and we're sitting in the lovely Court House out in Yackandandah, Victoria.
Yackandandah is is out in Northeast Victoria about 30 minutes south of the Murray not too far away
from the ski field, so it's in this beautiful little valley and it's my hometown, I was born
in the local hospital and it's a space that's very special to all of the directors at Archier.
So the clients were moving from Melbourne back up to the Northeast, bit of a tree change,
so they really wanted a house that was quite passive in its design and they wanted a really
generational home for them and their children. So it's quite a prominent site in the township,
it's adjacent to the local swimming pool and it sits right behind the local courthouse,
hence the name and just down from the police station so there was actually a holding cell
located where we're sitting at the moment. It's quite a difficult site as it has a road that runs
around the outside of it and it's quite exposed particularly in the winter, but the clients really
embraced that challenge because they understood this was going to be a multigenerational home and
they leant into revegetating the garden and that's a really long project and the clients
are really happy to do that cause they're avid gardeners but it takes quite a sophisticated
client to understand that this building, even though we finished it a few years ago it won't
truly be finished for another 15, 20 years. So we had to organise the building around a rear entry,
so you come down the side of the house you open the door and you're presented with a beautiful
kind of courtyard in the heart of the house, the client's an avid gardener so that was a really
appropriate response, we felt essentially from there all of the program circulates around that
central courtyard. The courtyard in the middle of the building separates out the kitchen,
dining kind of sitting space on the Northern side of the building which is also the public side of
the building and then all of the bedrooms are on the Southern side of the building,
so the the building kind of mediates that connection between community and retreat. So
the house actually achieves the kind of base level passive house rating, and that's not because we've
done anything special it's just been designed and detailed in a really kind of smart, efficient way.
We really want to find the most efficient and best way to build buildings so much so that
now we've started our own factory and we're starting to fabricate buildings in Melbourne,
just so we can completely control from the forest all the way through to building the house.
Quite a lot of the materials on the site were drawn from the local palette so we've got ruttle
timber on the outside treated with an osmo oil, the roof is just a galvanized roof which kind of
meets the Heritage requirements. All of the walls that you see here are the actual structural sifts
and which we've just painted those, and then we've lined the ceiling in a local
timber just to create some warmth. Structurally insulated panels are really fantastic technology,
it's just two layers of strand orientated board either side of a foam core, you can
achieve a really great thermal envelope without many layers of additional airtight membranes
etc etc so we found it quite a cost-effective way to build a super high performance home.
Most mornings that North facing glass heats up the slab enough,
clients very rarely need to put on the heating, then we've got quite deep eaves so in the summer
months they get very little solar game onto the slab and it remains pretty cool all year round.
We also have heat recovery ventilation which sucks all of the old air out of the bathrooms and pushes
fresh air into all of the bedrooms so the house always feels kind of light and fresh and lovely.
Favorite part of the building is the kind of social kitchen,
I'll sit and have a coffee with Julia and Craig just watch people kind of walk past
on the street you know wave and that's such a nice way to live, like connected to community
rather than retreating from community and yeah it's special because it's unique.
I look back on my childhood in Yackandandah with so much fondness and joy, being able to provide
kind of stage for another family to do that just means so much it's really really rewarding.
This The Local Project video is sponsored by Squarespace,
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