Sustainable living on the rise as more buyers and developers make the switch

It was a long, cold winter the year Davina Rooney moved into the old house she’d bought. Cracked floorboards and ill-fitting windows let in blasts of freezing air and the outdoor laundry was riddled with asbestos.

Friends suggested she’d best knock it down and start again; she didn’t want to listen. As the chief executive of the Green Building Council of Australia, her passion lies in recovering, recycling and retrofitting to renew and rebuild.

But when she talked to her first builder about renovating the draughty, cramped 1940s house in Roseville, on the upper north shore, to turn it into a light, bright, sustainable liveable home, he pulled no punches. She was, he said bluntly, insane.

“Happily, I then found another builder who was really on board with the idea, who gets even more excited about the notion of retrofitting homes sustainably,” says Rooney. “While there are lots of challenges with doing that to an old house, as there are always surprises with it, there’s a lot of energy embodied in an existing building.

“And the house had beautiful bones and so much character and potential, it would always have been far better to uplift it than knock it down and build a whole new building.”

Sustainability in housing has never been so cool – think solar power, less energy use, lighter-coloured roofs, collecting and using rainwater, recycling “grey” water, good insulation, LED lighting and energy-efficient appliances.

Until recently, it’s mostly been the realm of bespoke architect-designed houses for owners who have a particular interest in living in an environmentally friendly way. Today, however, renovators of old homes and the builders of new ones are increasingly concerned with creating a smaller carbon footprint.

While it can be more difficult, and costlier, to “green” an existing house or apartment, plenty of people are now undertaking the task. Even volume home-builders are often now intent on pushing the envelope.

“Our focus on sustainability is deliberate and is part of our DNA,” says Ray Baksmati, development director (NSW) at Frasers Property Australia. “I think customers now expect it, too. They want comfortable, well-designed, functional and energy-efficient homes that can run much more affordably.

“As well, they want to be part of resilient communities that can improve health and well-being, and don’t contribute to the rise in global temperatures and greenhouse gas emissions.”

At the company’s Fairwater development in Blacktown – NSW’s first highest rated six-star Green Star master-planned community and the third in Australia – all the home designs are as energy-efficient as possible, oriented to take advantage of sunlight and air, and fitted with fans, a geothermal heating and cooling system, and rainwater tanks for washing machines, toilets and outdoor taps.

With energy savings projected at $775 per household a year, the last of its total of 820 homes, ranging from $750,000 to $1.1 million, and sitting in 38 hectares of parkland and waterways with cycle paths and walking tracks, are due to be finished in early 2023.

Former town planner and project manager Camille Abbott, 65, bought into Fairwater three years ago with the youngest of her children, attracted by the community’s focus on reducing its footprint. “I’ve always been interested in sustainability and I like that most of the houses here have white roofs to reduce the urban heat effect, which is a real problem in western Sydney,” she says.

“I also like the way it’s planned, among mature trees and with a well-landscaped public domain and laneways, which is great when you have six grandchildren. I love that there’s an emphasis on community involvement too. I know heaps of people here, and everyone is really friendly and engaged.”

Those having individual homes designed by architects are also very rarely not on board with the environmental cause. “It’s now becoming so mainstream that it’s a given,” says Shaun Carter of Carter Williamson Architects.

“We’re finding a lot of clients want to move well beyond the BASIX [the NSW government’s building sustainability index to reduce household electricity and water use]. They have an emotional investment in having a smaller carbon footprint and the economic saving factor is now really clicking in too.”

It’s also a topic regularly brought up by renovators. Greg Kearney, managing director of Australian Home Renovations, says these days about 50 per cent of owners ask about sustainability.

“They want to know about home insulation, recycling water and LED lighting, which is pretty standard now,” he says. “But cost puts some off.”

Yet with sustainability retrofits, the eventual savings can be considerable. Rooney’s builder Trent Clark, director of Red Cedar Constructions, says including sustainability in the renovation can generally add between five and 15 per cent to the overall cost but, if it’s possible to achieve the top rating on a retrofit, there can be energy savings of between 75 and 90 per cent.

In addition, he estimates sustainability adds a financial value of an extra 9 per cent to a house, plus extra that’s incalculable in terms of the improvement in the health of the family living in the home.

“As well, it’s often a lot more simple than most people think to make an old house more sustainable,” Clark says. “I can’t hammer that home enough. You don’t need every trade who works on a house to understand what’s going on, either.

“Our clients seem mostly to be motivated by climate change and the fact they know if they spend more money at the start to get things right, they’ll be saving more money at the back end. And then there’s the health of the family in terms of getting more fresh air and natural light and being much more comfortable in their home.”

For Rooney, her project’s timing coincided with COVID-19, which made everything more complex. Beginning in mid-April, it was meant to be finished in September but is now more likely to finish at the end of this month, since the number of tradies allowed at the house has varied with the regulations.

In addition, the plan was that she and her husband would normally both have been at their offices and their two children, aged nine and seven, would have been at school while most of the work was carried out. Now, they’re having all to move out completely for the last stretch, to enable more workers in.

But at the end of it all, the house, with that outdoor laundry and a tiny third bedroom the size of a very small shoebox that could only be used as a study, will be transformed into a bright, light home, with all mod cons, bedrooms big enough for the kids and a guest room for the overseas in-laws to come and stay, and an outdoor area.

Its sustainable features will include oversized double-glazed windows, insulation under the floorboards and behind the walls, a heat-pump water system, ceiling fans, LED lighting, the capture and use of rainwater, becoming fully electric with more energy-efficient appliances and plans to add next-generation solar panels that work even when the house is overshadowed.

“People think it’s a big decision to make a house sustainable,” says Rooney, 41, who recently introduced the world’s first mass-market residential climate positive certification to Australia, the Green Star Home Standard system. “But I think of it more as a series of small decisions.

“You have to replace the windows, so why not make them bigger and use the best quality double glazing? Some people think it’s too hard, so they don’t do anything. But instead of having a small number of people doing sustainability perfectly, it’s far better to have a large number doing it imperfectly.

“What’s interesting about our project is how much further you can go with an existing house than you’d think to make it so much more liveable. That was a surprise. It may be slightly more complicated but the character and history make it quite a romantic journey at times.”

The price of her house becoming more sustainable in the renovation has probably added five to 10 per cent to the overall cost, believes Clark. Rendering the insides of the double-brick building made that airtight, then the insulation under the floor helped, as well as the good new windows, but it wasn’t viable to make the roof airtight too.

“There are a lot of leaky old houses out there,” says Clark, who’s currently also building an ultra-low energy passive house in Thornleigh. “Some are easier to renovate to add sustainability than others, but it’s always possible to improve every home.”