Walking the talk

Very grateful to cap off a big year for our Nulook Homes, Solar Dwellings & StepBeyond partnership being awarded the National Environment & Energy Efficiency Building Award for our West Leederville project.

Bond University’s The Happiness Project identified the Town of Cambridge – West Leederville to City Beach, as offering Western Australia’s best quality of life.

Using census and other data to review 540 municipalities across Australia across the following categories to produce an overall quality of life score:

1. Housing
2. Education
3. Community
4. Employment
5. Wealth
6. Accessibility
7. Work-life balance
8. Safety
9. Health

Thankyou and Congratulations to NuLook Homes and Solar Dwellings for partnering with StepBeyond to create the most Water and Energy Efficient build in Australia for 2018. See below for all the winners and finalists across the country.

2018 Housing Industry Association (HIA) Western Australian Award Winner:

Thankyou so much to Nulook Homes and Solar Dwellings for partnering with StepBeyond to help make this happen!

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City Pulse is an initiative by PWC released in 2018. It looks at the liveability across Perth i.e. work, live & play. Great information to maintain the conversation and more importantly enable results for on the ground action.

Download a copy of the report here

Source: PWC, 2018

Big night for our place at the 2018 Master Builders Association Western Australia Awards.  We were successful in both categories:

‘Best Water Wise’

‘Excellence in Energy Efficiency’

So great to be part of MBAWA and have partnered StepBeyond with Nulook Homes, Solar Dwellings and a brilliant bunch of organisations, trades and people to make this happen.

Sustainable House Day (SHD) is an Australian wide event run annually. Thanks Griff Morris from Solar Dwellings and Cassie Silver and co from Today Tonight for promoting SHD 2017:

We loved having 200+ visitors through our place, The West Leedie on SHD 2017. It was a festival atmosphere, especially when the Solar Dwellings buses rocked up.

stepbeyond.com.au

Functional creativity:

• The existing 50’s cottage was not structurally sound for renovation. StateWide Demolition advised they were able to re-use/recycle 97% of the pre-existing building materials.
• A (small) number of bottles of fine South West Australian wine at a cabin in Denmark WA, along with some scissors, cardboard and markers helped create our functional requirements.
• Essential homework and preparation with Landgate, Telstra, Western Power and the Water Corporation, to determine extent of telco/grid power/water in and out. No natural gas connection to the property and it stayed that way.

Solar passive design – there is way too much to write here so:

• See Griff and the team at Solar Dwellings – solardwellings.com.au
• yourhome.gov.au/passive-design/ (source of images below)
• Core design considerations included:
  • Integrating the buildings metabolism as part of the wider community/system i.e. mass, carbon, energy and water flows.
  • Perth climate – category 5 (temperate).
  • Windows/Glazing type, orientation and location.
  • Roof and ceiling buffer zones.
  • Mixed mass construction materials.
  • Natural lighting and shading, heating and cooling.
  • Natural ventilation and air flow – breathable walls and interior.
  • Certifications i.e. NatHers, carbon/energy/material/water lifecycle analysis, Greywater.
  • Hydrozones for bio-diversity – avoiding mono-cultures of plants, trees and shrubs.
  • Optimising use of natural energy from the earth and allowing groundwater replenishment for rainwater not harvested.
  • Renewable energy.