-Inside a Sustainable Beach Cabin Designed as an Escape From the City (Cabin Tour)

Sustainable design is fundamental to the role of the architect. If we're not dealing with sustainability, we're not really doing our jobs. And so much of sustainable design is about getting the basics right. Orientating towards the sun, letting lots of sun in winter, cutting out all the sun in summer. Getting those fundamental principles is central to sustainable design. I'm Andrew Maynard from Austin Maynard Architects and I designed this house. We're actually off to the side of St Andrew's Beach, which is a little hamlet of small houses and we are really buried into the dunes. There was nothing here previously and it really is full of just tea tree and wild rugged landscape really close to the ocean. The traditional owners of the land that we're on were Wurundjeri people from the Kulin Nation. The vision behind the project were two things. Number one was the location and the client really couldn't imagine how to sit something on the site that dealt with the views across to the ocean, across the dunes, the orientation of the sun, prevailing breezes. That's where we ended up with the circle. They really wanted to have a batch, which is a New Zealand type of shack. So they wanted to keep it quite small and simple. And to make sure that we designed the house in a way where the landscape could grow back quickly and healthily. When you come through the front door, we've gotten rid of corridors. There's basically one spiral stair that sits in the middle of the house that deals with all the circulation and spiralling off that is each of the spaces. Once you go up the spiral stair, you're introduced into a large open space, which has these beautiful green curtains on it. So like a lot of shacks or batches, instead of having defined bedrooms, it's one big space that you can then get privacy through bringing the curtains across. And then there's also a bathroom upstairs and a lovely void. So over the top of the kitchen, dining area, you get this great height. For a small project, there's a lot of sustainability embedded in it. The fundamentals are here. A lot of the glazing facing north with awnings to cut out the high summer sun. Thermal mass on the ground, which is a concrete slab that gets heated up in winter. We've also got a heat pump, which through sustainable energy and the solar panels, heats water that heats the slab to sustain the temperature during winter. All of the glazing is double glazing. All of the frames of the glazing are thermally separated, so you don't get any bridging. All of the water is collected from the roof and captured and reused on the gardens and in the toilet. The other important thing is that we've used timber throughout, and timber sequests carbon. So we're actually capturing carbon and storing in the building instead of producing carbon during the construction. Often people are scared of putting timber buildings exposed to such a hostile climate, but it's about timber selection. So using class one locally sourced gums and eucalypts is the key to having a really long lasting timber building. Beyond that, you also have the technology. So solar panels can use wind. And now we can have all electric homes completely free of fossil fuel, simply by getting rid of gas and having induction cooktops and heat pumps for all hot water. It's pretty easy and cheap nowadays. Sunlight is really important. We're in the middle of winter right now and the sun's coming in and I'm sweating, which is a good thing in winter, but then you want to control that in summer. So the high summer sun is getting excluded because of the design of the building. We've also got these beautiful big louver doors that let the light flood through summer and winter. But when the weather's grey, it means that the deck space, the dining and the living all become part of one big indoor outdoor space. The great thing about a circular home is it means that you can capture or exclude breezes and the wind whenever you need to. Here what we've got is one structural module and we've just repeated it 26 times around. So that actually reduces the amount of design in the structure and then we just finesse it in how each space is separated. So we've designed it so it's demountable. You can essentially come along and take this building down and rebuild it somewhere else or salvage the materials and use it somewhere else. Though the house may seem quite playful, there's rationality behind every decision. So for example, the structural frames that we're using are actually based on a standard window size. And so that leads to a lot of posts in the centre of the house. To get enough width to move through that, we've had to remove the post every now and then. So we've had to solve a structural problem by putting a steel galvanised tube that picks up loads and delivers it back to the ground. Really logical structure that just leads to a beautiful moment. The thing that I'm most proud of is that we've done a lot with a little. This is a small footprint, but it does everything you need in a holiday home. There can be a lot of people and everybody has their place or you can come by yourself on the weekend and it's beautiful and comfortable in each zone of the house.