In a piece of land in Sydney, architect Adam Haddows 69 m² playful brick house is a luxurious experiment in life with less.
While he occupied a spacious apartment on the roof, Haddow came to the realization that he and his husband only lived in one third. He asked himself: Could you reduce yourself and make your life better?
The multi-stage house in a three-meter block has a bedroom, a study, a kitchen, an apartment and a roof garden. Intelligent design creates a feeling of space in which the actual space is missing.
A tiny courtyard wraps around a tree that seems to be shooting from the side of the building, a skylight over a shower filled with a plant creates miracles and connection with nature.
Mr. Haddow, who is also the national president of the Australian Institute of Architects, says that the house shows that “you could have the luxury of a large apartment, but with a really small footprint”.
Adam Haddows award -winning house in downtown Sydney. ((Delivery: SJB)))
When the House won the Robin Boyd Award 2023 for residential architecture, the judges Haddow Haus described as a “spectacular example of a new approach to the city infill” at a time when the country “goes beyond the Australian tradition of the four bedroom, and the independent house is our only range of housing”.
“There is a large lesson in this building about letting go and understanding that memory is really helpful, but actually not that many things that don't have as much buildings at all, is released that it is liberating,” the architecture Guru Kevin McCcloud told ABCS Grand Designs Australia when he visited the building.
While the dreamy residence reacts to calls to increase the apartment density in existing suburbs, the price is unreachable for many.
However, some experts argue that the construction of smaller houses could reduce prices and accelerate the construction process.
The architectural critic Elizabeth Farrelly once said that Australian houses were great because people were greedy.
“We all taught to want as much as possible,” she said in 2003 to a reporter from Sydney Morning Herald.
“We are getting bigger and larger bedrooms, more Rumpus rooms, studios and studies and Christ knows what – it will continue to take how people can have,” said Ms. Farrelly.
In the two decades of this comment, the household size – the number of people who live together under one roof – has further back, while Australia has repeatedly built the largest houses in the world.
Data published yesterday by the real estate research company Cotality show that more than 60 percent of households consist of only one or two people, while the highest proportion of living space has three bedrooms.
But in the middle of an affordability and the supply crisis in housing – and the need to decarbonize – some people ask themselves the question: How much space do I need?
Why the obsession with the room?
Mr. Haddow believes that Australia's obsession has led us to build apartments that are larger than we need.
The average area of newly built free -standing houses in Australia is 232 m² (including garages when they are in the roof of the apartment), as the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows. This is a slight decrease compared to the peak of 246 m² from 2008.
When people think about their future requirements, they need “more and more in their thoughts [space] To be able to maintain life there, ”says Haddow.
The stamp tax also played a role: “If you move, you pay the stamp tax again. It starts to weigh people's thoughts and they are essentially looking for a larger house when they start,” he says.
On the booming real estate market of Australia, where a house is not only a place of residence, but also an investment, larger houses are becoming appetizing for the next buyer, says Haddow.
Dr. Julie Collins, the director and curator of the architecture museum at the University of South Australia, agrees. She says that the number of bedrooms, bathrooms and parking spaces has become a short measure for the property value.
In the 20th century, Australia followed the American trends towards larger bungalows in the suburb, after the austerity measures had limited the size of new buildings until the early 1950s, says Dr. Collins. (Nowadays, the average new house is about twice the size of a house that was built in the 1950s.)
Open Living also led to larger houses because it “created the need for additional rooms in which we have acoustic privacy,” she says. Suddenly television rooms and Butlers appear.
There are other drivers too. Mike Zorbas, Managing Director of Property Council, says that young adults who are longer at home in their parents – and work from home, have created an appetite among buyers on home offices, gyms and additional living areas.
Sue Schlesinger (left) receives advice after the downizing from Lissanne Oliver. ((ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens)))
Could you live with less?
Sue Schlesinger misses to have a piece of grass to describe them.
When she was reduced to one apartment by a family house with four bedrooms three years ago, she missed her garden the most. But vertical life is positive. “I like the view of the west of Melbourne, I like to see the sunsets and I like it when the weather comes in,” she says.
Ms. Schlesinger is familiar with letting go of things. She hired the professional organizer Lissanne Oliver to accelerate her house after the death of her husband and to sort several deceased lands that she was responsible for. “I didn't miss everything I moved to,” she says. “Every time I felt easier.”
Lissanne Oliver (left) helps people to let go of possessions they no longer need. ((ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens)))
Lately, Ms. Oliver Ms. Schlesinger has helped digitize old VHS bands and other family emorabilia. Ms. Oliver radiates energy and warmth. She does not work with people with Horten behavior. She works with what she calls “garden variety houses”.
Her role, she says, is to ask your customers the right questions to decide what they would like to keep or separate from each other or want to keep themselves differently. In almost every case, the result is more space. A room that is not used because it is full of excess objects is expensive, she says. “In my neighborhood, these costs are approximately $ 250,000 between an apartment with one and two bedrooms.”
Ms. Oliver does not know if there is a simple answer to the relationship between things and the size of the house. Does the desire to store belongings, people to live in larger rooms, or do people simply fill larger rooms with more belongings? She saw everything. But she believes that a simple question that people could ask is: “What would you actually put in your room if your house burned down, what would you go and replace?”
How big is too big?
Mr. Haddow believes that the Australians start thinking differently.
He says there is a shift towards “landscape as a luxury” and this was helped by the pandemic.
“What has happened in the past 50 years is that houses have grown and the websites were smaller,” he says. “[That has] She really worsened her living space outdoors and her garden room. “
People begin to recognize that outside space is a necessity and he believes that this will lead to smaller houses.
Cameron Kusher, Economy Economist, Research Research and Property Economist, is of the opinion that the construction of smaller houses could reduce real estate prices and shorten the time required for the construction of new houses.
“When the pandemic was hit, there was this massive escalation of the construction costs. Now that the escalation slowed down, but these prices do not decrease, it now costs a lot more to build the same houses that we built five or six years ago,” he recently told ABCS The Business.
“Perhaps we have to go back 30, 40 years ago where they had smaller houses and they can easily renovate. Over time, people can actually add bedrooms, add bathrooms, add parking spaces, veranden and add all this type of things to achieve added value,” he said. The fact that houses appreciate faster than other options also affects people's wishes to buy larger houses in advance, he says.
For buyers of homes who are ready to live in apartments, the lack of well -designed, family -friendly apartments remains a restriction.
Australia has some of the least dense cities in the world. The increasing apartment density through the construction of the so-called “Missing Middle” units, town houses and semi-dached houses in existing suburbs was proposed as a sustainable opportunity to counter the Australia's lack of living.
Dr. Nicola Willand, Associate Professor at the School of Real Estate, Building and Project Management at RMIT, says that Australia has a problem with “crawling rooms”. She argues that smaller rooms have to be accepted for a sustainable future. A sustainable housing operations “means that our houses are not our main room for every activity in our lives,” says Dr. Willand.
But how big is big enough? If Australia is to reach its residential and environmental goals, it must be considered sufficiently, she says. The Australian countries currently have energy efficiency standards, but the size of the living is overlooked, she says.
In view of the accuracy in housing construction, according to Dr. Willand both the environment (think of energy consumption, a home, as well as the embodied energy in the materials and processes that are used to build houses) and social measures.
“We need a certain amount of space, and if you have ever lived in a tiny apartment and while Covid were locked up there with children and they had to work from home, you will probably know what I mean,” she says.
“But at the other end, maximum where we say: 'Oh my god, now enough, everything beyond this would be excessively', we have no really thresholds there.”