Among The Scent Of Eucalyptus

When talk turns to sustainability in residential construction, certain aspects spring to mind. Solar panels tend to feature heavily, as do rainwater tanks and heat pumps. In fact it’s often the things that are added onto a project that tend to garner the most attention.

But there’s another way of viewing sustainable design and construction which has more in common with the ‘touch the earth lightly’ approach to architecture than some might think.

As both an architect and builder, Clinton Cole understands how to find that sweet spot between elegant, functional residential design and efficient, waste-less building practices.

By the time he was invited to design this property at Palm Beach, he had already worked with the owners to design and build their family home on Sydney’s lower north shore. Nicknamed Iron Maiden, that house is defined by an open air corridor running through its heart, turning the house on a corner site back in on itself and keeping the inhabitants consistently connected to changing weather conditions while creating a variety of common living spaces and private sleeping quarters.

So when they had the opportunity to design and build a holiday home on this idyllic coastal site on the fringe of Sydney’s Northern Beaches, it was no surprise that connection to the natural world would be at its heart. Having trusted him to build their permanent family residence, the owners asked Cole to help them select the right block from a choice of three possible options.

“Someone had bought the land 20 or 30 years ago as a superannuation plan and divided the site into three parts and my clients bought the middle one, so it’s a greenfield site,” he says.

“This was the one with the most natural beauty.”

With five mature trees and a large sandstone boulder on site, it was never in doubt that this project would work with the landscape rather than attempting to bend it to the designer’s will.

Instead of excavating, Cole designed a single level house on stilts that would connect with the tree canopy as much as possible.

“Carving the house into the hill wasn’t an option – why excavate the very landscape we’re celebrating? So we decided to plant it in the ground on bored concrete piers,” he says.

“The idea was to have the house feel like a cubby house. With five trees on the site we had to get (the house) to a certain level to get to the canopy. Then we 3D scaled each tree and each leaf so we could carefully place the building and every tree would be safe.”

The digitised version of the trees, including a Port Jackson fig that was subject to a conservation order, formed part of the approval process with council and meant that when the house was complete, the residents could immediately enjoy the benefits of living in close proximity to mature trees.

The house itself is a simple design — “it took 10 minutes to design” says Cole — which is in keeping with the lifestyle the owners were hoping to capture. There’s not even space wasted on an internal corridor, so that a trip to the bathroom requires guests to momentarily step onto the deck before going back indoors. A spiral staircase is the only sculptural element to compete with the natural beauty of the site.

“It wasn’t about making a statement,” he says. “You don’t see it from the street so that was a low priority. It was designed so that you could walk around barefoot or have a shower at the back of the stairs after walking back from the beach.”

Materials are simple but have nonetheless been chosen with care. The framework consists of kiln dried Australian blackbutt and steel flitch beams with spotted gum lining the internal walls. The ceiling and roof are made up of lightweight galvanised iron sheeting while the outdoor flooring is fibre reinforced plastic (FRP). Cole says all materials, including the FRP, have been chosen for longevity.

“FRP is used on oil rigs and marine environments because it’s bulletproof,” he says. “That’s one of the higher embodied energy materials we used here but compared with timber decking, this comes out way ahead. It lasts about four times as long as timber.”

Heavy netting has also been used as an unconventional flooring/ seating option as well as ‘screening’ to add to the sense of living amongst the trees.

“The netting kept the terrace area really light,” says Cole. “I got the idea when I was at indoor cricket sitting behind the net. After a couple of minutes the netting disappears visually.”

In keeping with its summertime vibes, the outdoor areas are almost the same size as the indoor spaces, with large, timber framed sliding doors retracting to maximise the living area. Meant for hosting visiting family, the house has a holiday feel with built-in double bunk beds in the secondary bedroom ideal for sleepovers.

Keeping in mind the amount of waste typically generated on building sites, Cole designed the house ‘like a Meccano set’.

“Because of the distance in terms of travel time from the (inner city) office and I am usually on site once or twice a week, I designed it to be built without supervision, like a Meccano set, shaping bits
of timber, cutting to length and drilling the holes and putting bits into holes,” he says.

It was just as well, given the lockdown periods Sydney — and the Northern Beaches — went through when the house was being built. As a result, he only visited the site twice in the six months it took to build.

“Normally you wouldn’t be able to build a basement in that time if you were dealing with excavation,”

Cole says. “It was appropriate for the site, as well as the budget.”

Relying on passive design principles such as cross ventilation and the thermal chimney effect where rising hot air is released from the house via strategically placed louvred vents, the only obvious concessions to conventional cooling methods are ceiling fans in the living room and bedrooms.

Because the trees have been retained, solar panels were not considered suitable for this house — ‘it’s too overshadowed’ — so its sustainable credentials are not obvious.

“It’s not the most prevalent sustainability project,” says Cole. “There are no solar panels or heat pumps, it has none of those things.

“But half the carbon in a building is not in the life cycle of the building, it’s in the resources that go into building it. We worked on the embodied energy being as low as possible. It’s something we’re doing more and more.”

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Former President Donald Trump said he would ban undocumented immigrants from obtaining home mortgages, a move he indicated would help ease home prices even though these buyers account for a tiny fraction of U.S. home sales.

Home loans to undocumented people living in the U.S. are legal but they aren’t especially common. Between 5,000 and 6,000 mortgages of this kind were issued last year, according to estimates from researchers at the Urban Institute in Washington.

Overall, lenders issued more than 3.4 million mortgages to all home purchasers in 2023, federal government data show.

Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, made his comments Thursday during a policy speech to the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan.

Housing remains a top economic issue for voters during this presidential election. Rent and home prices grew at historic rates during the pandemic and mortgage rates climbed to levels not seen in more than two decades. A July Wall Street Journal poll showed that voters rank housing as their second-biggest inflation concern after groceries.

Both major candidates for the 2024 presidential election have made appeals to voters on housing during recent campaign stops, though the issue has so far featured more prominently in Vice President Kamala Harris ’s campaign.

Trump has blamed immigrants for many of the nation’s woes, including crime and unemployment. Now, he is pointing to immigrants as a cause of the nation’s housing-affordability crisis. Yet some affordable-housing advocates and real-estate professionals said Trump’s mortgage proposal would fail to bring relief to priced-out home buyers.

“It’s unfortunate that given the significant housing affordability crisis that is widely acknowledged across most partisan lines, we are arguing about a minuscule segment of the market,” said David Dworkin, president of the National Housing Conference, an affordable-housing advocacy group.

Gary Acosta, chief executive of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, a trade organization, said, “It’s just another effort to vilify immigrants and to continue to scapegoat them for any issues that we have here in the United States.”

A Trump campaign spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. can obtain an obscure type of mortgage designed for taxpayers without Social Security numbers, most of whom are Hispanic. The passage of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 allowed banks to use identification numbers from the Internal Revenue Service as an alternative to Social Security, extending a number of financial services to people without legal status for the first time.

Mortgage loans for undocumented immigrants are typically higher interest and borrowers include legal residents who have undocumented spouses, Acosta said. Lenders include regional credit unions and community-development financial institutions.

In his speech, Trump said that “the flood” of undocumented immigrants is driving up housing costs. “That’s why my plan will ban mortgages for illegal aliens,” he said.

Trump didn’t elaborate on how he would enact a ban on such loans.

Though mortgages for undocumented people living in the U.S. are relatively rare, residential real-estate purchases by foreign nationals are big business , especially in expensive coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles. These sales have declined in recent years, however.

Close to half of foreign purchases are made by people residing abroad, while the other half are made by recent immigrants or residents on nonimmigrant visas, according to an annual survey by the National Association of Realtors. Many affluent foreigners buy U.S. homes with cash instead of obtaining mortgage financing.

In his Thursday speech, which focused mostly on other economic matters such as energy and taxation, Trump proposed other measures to bring down housing costs, including cutting regulations for builders and allowing more building on federal land. Similar ideas appeared in the housing policy outline Harris released in August .

The former president has spoken on housing-related issues in speeches at other recent campaign stops, including in Michigan last month, where he touted his administration’s 2020 overturn of a policy that had encouraged cities to reduce racial segregation .

“I keep the suburbs safe,” Trump said. “I stopped low-income towers from rising right alongside of their house. And I’m keeping the illegal aliens away from the suburbs.”

Among The Scent Of Eucalyptus

It’s what hasn’t changed on this site that makes this residence so exceptional

The Republican nominee says it would help bring down home prices, though these buyers account for a fraction of U.S. home sales