The luxury property market embracing a surprising new approach to building the dream home
Wealthy homeowners are voting with their wallets, exploring environmentally conscious ways to design and run their homes
5 min
From the Spring issue of Kanebridge Quarterly. Order your copy here.
Design can achieve great things when environmentally enthusiastic homeowners have terrifically deep pockets. The rich and famous have long been ground-breakers in sustainable residential design, laying the foundations of a stealth-wealth aesthetic by funding innovative architects and new technologies.
Sustainability is now sexy with Hollywood heavyweights leading the charge.
Johnny Depp’s Bahamian island, Little Hall’s Pond Cay, cost him US$3.6 million in 2004 but the Pirates of the Caribbean star is rumoured to have spent millions more on enlisting the talents of home-brew hydrogen energy expert Mike Strizki to make the isle self-sufficient. Entourage actor Adrian Grenier, who hosts sustainability makeover TV show Alter Eco, has walked the talk with a house in Brooklyn, New York featuring walls insulated with recycled denim and rooftop gardens installed in an effort to eliminate the need for air conditioning.
Veteran actor Ed Begley Jr. famously built a luxury Californian home that achieved a LEED Platinum certification, the world’s most prestigious rating system for green buildings. He did it by recycling 96 percent of materials from the pre-existing house and adding a 9kw photovoltaic system and Tesla Power-wall.
Closer to home, in the early 2000s Cate Blanchett upcycled her former Sydney home with $1.5 million in renovations including a 20,000L water tank, high-tech solar panelling, low energy lighting and grey water recycling. Before eventually selling the Hunters Hill home and moving to London with husband Andrew Upton and their children, the pair were also instrumental in turning The Wharf Theatre green by installing approximately 2000 solar panels to provide 70 percent of the venue’s electricity and a system for rainwater harvesting.
Sean Triner, who works in environmental fundraising and is on the board of WWF Australia, wanted to challenge the idea that luxury and sustainability were mutually exclusive when he and his partner Christiana Stergiou built their Queensland home, Kingfisher House, in 2022.
Designed by PTMA Architecture and built by Kai Konstruct, the Currumbin Waters residence sits on a 5640sq m block, earned an energy-efficiency rating of 9.1 stars, featured twice in the national Sustainable House Day event and was the most-visited home in the Gold Coast Open House Architectural Festival in 2022 and 2023.
“We wanted a sustainable house, but also wanted to be able to have a pool heater, charge our electric car, or turn the aircon on whenever we felt like it — basically we wanted to have it all,” he says. “Our idea was to show that you can reduce your carbon footprint dramatically and still get all those luxuries you might want.
“Usually when you’re designing a home, you want form, function and price. Does it do the job? Does it look nice? And can we afford it? We just added a fourth pillar — form, function, price and sustainability.”
The six-bedroom, barn-style smart home has a central courtyard with an automated roof, a wine cabinet opening to a secret games room in the attic, a solar-heated swimming pool, a self-contained pool house, a cyclone-rated zinc roof, a 20kw PV solar power system and 12kw battery store, two 27,000L water tanks and an underground garage with 7kw WallBox electric car charger.
“Another really simple but important thing is to consider fauna by planting local species. Everything we’ve done in terms of landscaping includes varieties from the region and edible plants that don’t harm the wildlife,” Triner adds. “As soon as we’d done the planting we started to see tracks of everything from echidnas to wallabies and have even seen koalas in our trees.”
Architect Chris Major, co-founder of Welsh+Major, says sustainability is a priority among many clients of high spec builds today.
“There’s a whole range of things clients are looking for. The obvious add ons are around water tanks and solar panels but batteries are fast becoming sought after, especially for those with bigger budgets. Reliability of power supply is a genuine concern,” she says.
“Many clients also want to make sure there are great sustainable choices made in materials and sometimes that comes with an extra price tag. When you’ve got deeper pockets, that’s something you can definitely do; support local designers over using potentially cheaper imported products.”
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“Our local designers are equally talented,” Major says. “We also have such beautiful materials in Australia and if we can source them sustainably here, that’s what we’re interested in.”
For a long time, bigger meant better in the built environment, but that obsession with larger-than-life luxury is falling out of fashion.
“Now it’s more about the quality of spaces rather than the biggest house possible,” she says. “The move is towards luxury in a more restrained way.”
While intelligent architecture has always liked to push the envelope with the latest mod cons, the current environmental climate and recent natural disasters have had homeowners rethinking the their designer add ons.
“People are more conscious of the amount of energy that goes into building and running a home. It’s that idea of quality over quantity,” she says. “Passive solar design is really in focus now. It’s not that it was ever unfashionable, but some of these principles were forgotten in the midst of new technology.
“You can have solar panels, rainwater tanks, heat pumps and geothermal tech — which are all great — but they’re no substitute for just really good decisions around orientation, capturing cooling breezes and natural light.”
Savvy sustainable design can make a home a pleasure to live in, but really smart environmental decisions make for strong ROI, says David Medina of Sotheby’s International NSW, who regularly sells in the wealthy regional playgrounds of Byron Bay and the Southern Highlands.
“Sustainability is really important for buyers today,” he says. “Going back 15 years, one of the first questions I’d get asked was ‘Does it have access to power?’ That’s now moved from number one or two on the list to about number 10.” These days, he says, prestige purchasers are today more concerned about producing their own electricity.
“In terms of resale, it’s a huge bonus to not be reliant on town power. Although they’re probably not as troubled by running costs as the average Australian, the luxury of living totally off-grid gives people a lot of strength. If there’s a storm or blackout and you’ve got a generator that kicks in to back up the battery then it gives them peace of mind.”
He says buyers also want enhanced water storage solutions, double or triple-glazed windows as well as savvy orientation to capture the best views, natural light and airflow. Some are even opting for small wind turbines.
“When homeowners are building they’re thinking further ahead than ever,” says Medina. “Now the quality of products, the build quality, the architecture, is just developing at a rate of knots. I’m really excited to see what the next thing is going to be.”
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Weary of ‘smart’ everything, Americans are craving stylish ‘analog rooms’ free of digital distractions—and designers are making them a growing trend.
5 min
James and Ellen Patterson are hardly Luddites. But the couple, who both work in tech, made an unexpectedly old-timey decision during the renovation of their 1928 Washington, D.C., home last year.
The Pattersons had planned to use a spacious unfinished basement room to store James’s music equipment, but noticed that their children, all under age 21, kept disappearing down there to entertain themselves for hours without the aid of tablets or TVs.
Inspired, the duo brought a new directive to their design team.
The subterranean space would become an “analog room”: a studiously screen-free zone where the family could play board games together, practice instruments, listen to records or just lounge about lazily, undistracted by devices.
For decades, we’ve celebrated the rise of the “smart home”—knobless, switchless, effortless and entirely orchestrated via apps.
But evidence suggests that screen-free “dumb” spaces might be poised for a comeback.
Many smart-home features are losing their luster as they raise concerns about surveillance and, frankly, just don’t function.
New York designer Christine Gachot said she’d never have to work again “if I had a dollar for every time I had a client tell me ‘my smart music system keeps dropping off’ or ‘I can’t log in.’ ”
Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” reached an all-time high in 2025. In the past four years on TikTok, videos tagged #AnalogLife—cataloging users’ embrace of old technology, physical media and low-tech lifestyles—received over 76 million views.
And last month, Architectural Digest reported on nostalgia for old-school tech : “landline in hand, cord twirled around finger.”
Catherine Price, author of “ How to Break Up With Your Phone,” calls the trend heartening.
“People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real life interactions and taking steps through design choices to create an alternative, places where people can be fully present,” said Price, whose new book “ The Amazing Generation ,” co-written with Jonathan Haidt, counsels tweens and kids on fun ways to escape screens.
From both a user and design perspective, the Pattersons consider their analog room a success.
Freed from the need to accommodate an oversize television or stuff walls with miles of wiring, their design team—BarnesVanze Architects and designer Colman Riddell—could get more creative, dividing the space into discrete music and game zones.
Ellen’s octogenarian parents, who live nearby, often swing by for a round or two of the Stock Market Game, an eBay-sourced relic from Ellen’s childhood that requires calculations with pen and paper.
In the music area, James’s collection of retro Fender and Gibson guitars adorn walls slicked with Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green , while the ceiling is papered with a pattern that mimics the organic texture of vintage Fender tweed.
A trio of collectible amps cluster behind a standing mic—forming a de facto stage where family and friends perform on karaoke nights. Built-in cabinets display a Rega turntable and the couple’s vinyl record collection.
“Playing a game with family or doing your own little impromptu karaoke is just so much more joyful than getting on your phone and scrolling for 45 minutes,” said James.
Screen-Free ‘Escapes’
“Dumb” design will likely continue to gather steam, said Hans Lorei, a designer in Nashville, Tenn., as people increasingly treat their homes “less as spaces to optimise and more as spaces to retreat.”
Case in point: The top-floor nook that designer Jeanne Hayes of Camden Grace Interiors carved out in her Connecticut home as an “offline-office” space.
Her desk? A periwinkle beanbag chair paired with an ottoman by Jaxx. “I hunker down here when I need to escape distractions from the outside world,” she explained.
“Sometimes I’m scheming designs for a project while listening to vinyl, other times I’m reading the newspaper in solitude. When I’m in here without screens, I feel more peaceful and more productive at the same time—two things that rarely go hand in hand.”
A subtle archway marks the transition into designer Zoë Feldman’s Washington, D.C., rosy sunroom—a serene space she conceived as a respite from the digital demands of everyday life.
Used for reading and quiet conversation, it “reinforces how restorative it can be to be physically present in a room without constant input,” the designer said.
Laura Lubin, owner of Nashville-based Ellerslie Interiors, transformed a tiny guest bedroom in her family’s cottage into her own “wellness room,” where she retreats for sound baths, massages and reflection.
“Without screens, the room immediately shifts your nervous system. You’re not multitasking or consuming, you’re just present,” said Lubin.
As a designer, she’s fielding requests from clients for similar spaces that support mental health and rest, she said.
“People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” she explained. “Homes are no longer just places to live—they’re expected to actively support well-being.”
Designer Molly Torres Portnof of New York’s DATE Interiors adopted the same brief when she designed a music room for her husband, owner of the labels Greenway Records and Levitation, in their Lido Beach, N.Y. home. He goes there nightly to listen to records or play his guitar.
The game closet from the townhouse in “The Royal Tenenbaums”? That idea is back too, says Gachot. Last year she designed an epic game room backed by a rock climbing wall for a young family in Montana.
When you’re watching a show or on your phone, “it’s a solo experience for the most part,” the designer said. “The family really wanted to encourage everybody to do things together.”
Analog Accessories
Don’t have the space—or the budget—to kit out an entire retro rec room?
“There are a lot of small tweaks you can make even if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to design a fully analog room from scratch,” said Price.
Gachot says “the small things in people’s lives are cues of what the bigger trends are.”
More of her clients, she’s noticed, have been requesting retrograde staples, such as analog clocks and magazine racks.
For her Los Angeles living room, chef Sara Kramer sourced a vintage piano from Craigslist to be the room’s centerpiece, rather than sacrifice its design to the dominant black box of a smart TV. Alabama designer Lauren Conner recently worked with a client who bought a home with a rotary phone.
Rather than rip it out, she decided to keep it up and running, adding a silver receiver cover embellished with her grandmother’s initials.
Some throwback accessories aren’t so subtle. Melia Marden was browsing listings from the Public Sale Auction House in Hudson, N.Y. when she spotted a phone booth from Bell Systems circa the late 1950s and successfully bid on it for a few hundred dollars.
“It was a pandemic impulse buy,” said Marden.
In 2023, she and her husband, Frank Sisti Jr., began working with designer Elliot Meier and contractor ReidBuild to integrate the booth into what had been a hallway linen closet in their Brooklyn townhouse.
Canadian supplier Old Phone Works refurbished the phone and sold them the pulse-to-tone converter that translates the rotary dial to a modern phone line.
The couple had collected a vintage whimsical animal-adorned wallpaper (featured in a different colourway in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) and had just enough to cover the phone booth’s interior.
Their children, ages 9 and 11, don’t have their own phones, so use the booth to communicate with family. It’s also become a favorite spot for hiding away with a stack of Archie comic books.
The booth has brought back memories of meandering calls from Marden’s own youth—along with some of that era’s simple joy. As Meier puts it: “It’s got this magical wardrobe kind of feeling.”
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