Author: Paul

We’ve had some more back and forth. I propose something weird, Christian and Deepti temper it with some realism. I push for more weirdness… and so on. I countered by making the south wall needlessly complicated: At some point in here, we explored the idea of moving the main bedroom left, and swapping it with the bathroom/plant room. It added a small west-facing window in the kinked wall looking down the entrance path, which I really liked, but it meant accessing the bathroom only via…Continue Reading “Refining the floor plan” →

After waving some increasingly outlanding window designs at Christian and Deepti, who were no doubt wondering what they’d gotten themselves into, they came back with another new concept – tilt the entire kitchen/living/dining room. This made the end wall of the room basically parallel to the BAL contour, maximising the size of the room without offending the council. It also introduced a ‘proper’ front door on the south side, bring the well into play as an entrance feature. I also liked this idea as I…Continue Reading “Getting tilted” →

Christian and Deepti came back with a more….realistic design. I like to think of J’s design as like a concept car – it’s very pretty, but the production version is a bit more conservative and practical. 🙂 The U-shape was collapsed to a more conventional design, which works better on the narrow block. They integrated the laundry into the end of the hallway, allowing good airflow down the east-west spine of the house. There wasn’t really a front door per se, the large window in…Continue Reading “Design Update” →

Armed with my terrible BAL assessment, and with the contract deadlines looming, I did the vaguely sensible thing and ran to an expert. I’d gone visiting houses for Sustainable House Day back in September, and one of them was an awesome two-story strawbale house in Doubleview, built and owned by two architects Christian and Deepti. I cold-called Christian, explained my predicament and begged for some of his time – if nothing else, just to see if I was at all sane, or if I should…Continue Reading “To the experts!” →

So my mate J got a bit….excited…and started designing houses, based on some very rough criteria I’d given him – solar passive design, 3×1, relatively narrow block. He came up with this: