Beating the heat - and rising energy prices

The owners of this property in Sydney’s outer west never set out to be environmentalists. And, at first glance, the sprawling luxury home they built at Twin Creeks at Luddenham does not appear to be eco friendly. But appearances can be deceiving.

When they approached building designer Luke Van Jour at Distinct Innovations, they wanted a resort-style home befitting the spacious greenfield location at the golf course estate. A large, wraparound pool would be at the centre of the design for the single level home, along with three entertaining areas, an outdoor cabana and home theatre. This would be in addition to four bedrooms, a guest room and a study.

With about 4,000sqm to work with, there was plenty of room to move so the owner decided to include a spacious home gym. He also wanted a half size tennis and basketball court to round out the leisure options – and to fulfil a childhood dream.

“The client had a tough upbringing,” Van Jour says. “When his parents were not around he used to go to the local basketball court to shoot hoops, so including a basketball court was about bringing back some of those positive childhood memories.”

With a healthy budget to work with, Van Jour was tasked with creating a resort-style experience, with a wet bar and water wall next to the outdoor kitchen, all in a single level design so that every day would feel like a holiday for the family.

“The client had spent a lot of time travelling the world,” he says. “When he came home, he wanted that same feeling that he experienced when he was staying in hotels and resorts overseas. Everything had to be wrapped around this pool.”

In keeping with the luxury theme, Van Jour specified several home automation options.

“It’s a key part of this house,” he says. “You can turn on the aircon, warm up the coffee machine, open the garage doors. It also has security and biometric systems.”

With all the hi tech, it might be easy to miss the lengths Van Jour has gone to in order to design a house which is a little easier on the environment – and the owners’ bank balance – than you might expect of a building this size.

“I designed the house to block as much sun in summer as I could and bring as much winter sun into the

house as possible,” he said. “The whole house was double glazed and full passive design. It is brick veneer on concrete slab-on-ground with stone floors to allow for optimum thermal mass.”

There’s also a 8kw system of photovoltaic cells to cut down on energy bills, and rainwater tanks that hold up to 100,000L for washing clothes, topping up the pool and watering the garden.

“Without the solar panels, if this house had to run on standard electricity, it would easily be $7000 to $8000 a quarter but now it is about $2000 to $3000 a quarter,” Van Jour said.

However, it took a little while for the owners to get into the swing.

“When the clients first moved in, the bill for the first quarter was close to $10,000,” he said. “The owner asked me what was going on.

“In Luddenham, it gets down to -2C in winter and up to 48C or 49C in summer but when I went over, he greeted me in shorts and a t-shirt in the middle of winter.”

As it transpired, all the thermostats had been set to 28C and both the reverse cycle air conditioning and the underfloor heating had been turned on. There were also four large screen TVs running 24/7 and the pool pump had malfunctioned so that it was running day and night when it should only operate four hours a day. After turning off the aircon completely (it was installed mainly for cooling the house in summer), resetting the temperature of the underfloor heating, fixing the pool pump and only using the TVs when there was someone in the room, the bill dropped almost 80 percent the next quarter.

The house took 18 months to build, which is relatively speedy for its size. Now, the family enjoys a resort lifestyle while reducing their bills – and their impact on the environment. When it runs well.

“We did all the right things but if the house is not operated properly, it’s a waste of time.”

There has been a substantial increase in the number of Australians earning high incomes who are renting their homes instead of owning them, and this may be another element contributing to higher market demand and continually rising rents, according to new research.

The portion of households with an annual income of $140,000 per year (in 2021 dollars), went from 8 percent of the private rental market in 1996 to 24 percent in 2021, according to research by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). The AHURI study highlights that longer-term declines in the rate of home ownership in Australia are likely the cause of this trend.

The biggest challenge this creates is the flow-on effect on lower-income households because they may face stronger competition for a limited supply of rental stock, and they also have less capacity to cope with rising rents that look likely to keep going up due to the entrenched undersupply.

The 2024 ANZ CoreLogic Housing Affordability Report notes that weekly rents have been rising strongly since the pandemic and are currently re-accelerating. “Nationally, annual rent growth has lifted from a recent low of 8.1 percent year-on-year in October 2023, to 8.6 percent year-on-year in March 2024,” according to the report. “The re-acceleration was particularly evident in house rents, where annual growth bottomed out at 6.8 percent in the year to September, and rose to 8.4 percent in the year to March 2024.”

Rents are also rising in markets that have experienced recent declines. “In Hobart, rent values saw a downturn of -6 percent between March and October 2023. Since bottoming out in October, rents have now moved 5 percent higher to the end of March, and are just 1 percent off the record highs in March 2023. The Canberra rental market was the only other capital city to see a decline in rents in recent years, where rent values fell -3.8 percent between June 2022 and September 2023. Since then, Canberra rents have risen 3.5 percent, and are 1 percent from the record high.”

The Productivity Commission’s review of the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement points out that high-income earners also have more capacity to relocate to cheaper markets when rents rise, which creates more competition for lower-income households competing for homes in those same areas.

ANZ CoreLogic notes that rents in lower-cost markets have risen the most in recent years, so much so that the portion of earnings that lower-income households have to dedicate to rent has reached a record high 54.3 percent. For middle-income households, it’s 32.2 percent and for high-income households, it’s just 22.9 percent. ‘Housing stress’ has long been defined as requiring more than 30 percent of income to put a roof over your head.

While some high-income households may aspire to own their own homes, rising property values have made that a difficult and long process given the years it takes to save a deposit. ANZ CoreLogic data shows it now takes a median 10.1 years in the capital cities and 9.9 years in regional areas to save a 20 percent deposit to buy a property.

It also takes 48.3 percent of income in the cities and 47.1 percent in the regions to cover mortgage repayments at today’s home loan interest rates, which is far greater than the portion of income required to service rents at a median 30.4 percent in cities and 33.3 percent in the regions.

Beating the heat – and rising energy prices – in a luxury property

Temperatures can exceed 40C in Sydney’s west but everyone keeps their cool in this resort-style home

This may be contributing to continually rising weekly rents