An Architect's Own Environmentally-Friendly Timber Home

I'll say to most of my clients, I've got a timber house, there's timber on the outside, I'm happy to maintain it, that's on me, but I'm not going to impose that upon you. I'm Ben Callery, this is our house in Northcote. We came to buying this house after we outgrew our previous house that we'd built in Brunswick. We found this house which was in desperate need of renovation. The concept behind this house is just the idea of being more natural in our approach. A lot of our life is so exposed to things that aren't in touch with nature, it's nice to have your home is much more in touch with nature. Right from the start, we made a decision to keep the front half of the house and that is the philosophy that we often find we execute. Keep the embodied energy that's been there for 100 years, sure, do upgrades to it to make it much more family sound, new double glazed windows, new insulation, solar panels on the roof, all these contemporary things that we've added to it, but then from there back we've made a clear break and the back half is much more integrated with the environment from first principles as opposed to retrofitting it. We took an approach here to use very natural materials and all sustainably sourced and much lower embodied energy, hence the structure is pretty much all timber except for some concrete stumps, but it went on a slab and a little bit of steel to get the spans that we need, but the majority of it's just timber apart from that, but then high levels of insulation, well sealed, and it's good to test that out and see that yes, that can still be quite a family sound approach without the same level of embodied energy. We kept the front two rooms of the existing house and did them up to make them nicer, but essentially kept them as the same function bedrooms, and then the middle room was always a lounge. We've kept it pretty much as that, but reoriented it. That enabled us to then have laundry and bathroom in the middle of the house. This is your classic open plan living area, but laid out in a very different way to what you'd normally find in a single funded house. Normally you often see, you know, kitchen, meals, living, opening to the back doors. Here we made a really conscious decision to actually put the kitchen at the back of the house because that's where you spend so much of your time, especially as parents with kids, you're spending so much time at the bench, you want to be able to flow straight outside or look outside, and then having the meals area next to that creates this really nice interaction between inside and out. Then upstairs we've got two more bedrooms plus a bathroom, and then the little floating study nook slash play space. The timber that we've used throughout a lot of the house, certainly the decking and the cladding is Silvertop Ash, a local Victorian hardwood source from Radial Timber Sales who selectively log and mill it in such a way that it's very low wastage. So we use their product a lot because it's very environmentally efficient, and in that method of milling they create different thicknesses of timber as they radially cut the logs, and we've intentionally used many of those thicknesses throughout. So we're using the narrower 55mm slats there, and then the thicker 80mm slats there, and then the wider 110mm boards on the decking at the back, so kind of this idea of using all parts of the tree, not actually wasting anything. Even just having a timber building, I think this is more of that, you know, me being able to relay experiences to clients. I'll say to most of my clients, I've got a timber house, there's timber on the outside, I'm happy to maintain it, that's on me, but I'm not going to impose that upon you. So if we're going to give you a timber house, we either know that you're going to have to maintain it on the first floor in particular, which isn't going to be easy, or you're going to let it go grey gracefully, and that's not a bad thing either.