When we first moved in here, you know we noticed a lot of people dropping into the
building site I think they're trying to work out what is this wacky house,
and so we thought when we move in all right we we'll letter-drop the local
area and we'll invite everyone around for a drink and so they could come and see it. It
was cool we got a big turnout it was a really great way of of meeting the neighbourhood,
but also talking to them about design and I think that gets back to that point
around designers and architects responsibility to the community,
it's our responsibility to lead but also to talk and provides a bit of the reasons why,
and one neighbor was like she sort of looks off and she like I don't even feel like I'm in a house
and that was a really cool thing because spacially she was in something very different for her so she
was in a covered space completely enclosed around her in walls but also within the garden space.
I'm Jimmy Thompson, design director at MJA studio and this is my home.
North Perth is an established suburb and it's quite multicultural in the way but it's been
inhabited for for the last 100 years. As planning changes and zoning changes,
a lot of the character of the neighbourhood also started to change, so people's backyards started
to be subdivided and there was a loss of canopy coverage and a lot of the edible garden spaces.
The home itself is a courtyard house, the house is designed on a 12 x 12 grid on the laneway side,
you can carve out a portion where you can park and then adjacent to that is the front door.
Then when you enter to the left you have a bedroom suite so all of that faces North,
that bedroom then expands and takes in the whole courtyard, what we describe as a summer
courtyard space because you have a lot of shade in there you've got outdoor bath, outdoor fan,
and that's where that charcoal barbecue is and then on the North side we have a studio space,
predominantly that is South light into that zone which is perfect for for working so you don't get
direct light and contrast over workspaces and then upstairs is an L-shaped space,
that means we can still get heaps of North light into the lower level but we get this great view to
the city and to the South while still maintaining really good access to light up here so that even
though you're in small spaces you might be in taller volumes, or you might borrow
views through glazing so suddenly that small, small footprint actually feels like a big generous home.
Across our home there's three different garden spaces, on the outside of the courtyard walls what
I'd describe as the kind of perimeter garden, that's all edible plants and trees. Then the
central courtyard space is what we described as a medicinal garden, so these are a series of plants
and trees and shrubs which can be used for teas and tinctures. The rest of the garden spaces are
on the roof so all of those green roofs are a case study in demonstrating that you can use Western
Australian endemic plants in a green roof scenario within Perth. The great thing about that is that
they support local flora and fauna, so you often see a lot of birds up there you know there's a lot
of life up there and so these three garden types enable the house to achieve 100% green plot ratio.
So we wanted to demonstrate that there's a different way of doing it, that you could
actually replace all that area of backyard in a new house with gardens and courtyards,
but you'd have to do it over multiple levels, so the idea was and the challenge
was can we get it to 100% green plot ratio and can we do it in a way that's compliant with
the existing planning codes and can you be generous to your neighbours.
Because at the end of the day our industry contributes about 40% to global carbon emissions
every year so everything that we do in design we've got to find ways of doing it better. Our
approach to sustainability as a practice is always to have a really solid base of passive
design. Insulated cavity brick work, it's really deep it's 350 mls, hard wall insulation within
that and then we've got the green roofs so they essentially provide really good thermal mass.
Sustainability doesn't have to be a separate element that's bolted on to design at a later
date, you really want it to be enmeshed within all the conceptual ideas of the home or project.