The new broom bringing confidence back to the multi-residential market
Buyers had more chance of winning $20 million in the lottery than buying into a building with no defects, one expert says
5 min
Most of us watched in disbelief as the nightly news flashed reports about the thousands of residents evacuated from their western Sydney apartment block on Christmas Eve 2018. The dire warning of a possible collapse in the Opal Tower came after several residents reported hearing loud cracks in the apartment block of 392 homes at Sydney Olympic Park. Structural cracks were found in the pre-cast concrete panels.
Months later, 130 residents were given hours to flee their 10-storey Mascot apartment building after cracks were discovered in the basement raising concerns of collapse. They were never able to move back in.
These homeowners became the very public face of the poor standards plaguing the $24 billion NSW building and property development industry. But you didn’t have to end up on the six o’clock news to empathise.
Four in 10 new residential apartment blocks in NSW have serious defects at an average cost of more than $330,000 a building, according to the Strata Community Association of NSW, with waterproofing and fire safety the most common problems.
And up until recently, the only avenue homeowners had to seek help was negotiating directly with the builder or developer, or embarking on a lengthy and expensive legal battle to get the defects rectified.
For more stories like these, order your copy of the autumn issue of Kanebridge Quarterly magazine here.
When the first NSW building commissioner was appointed in 2019 under the Berejiklian government, changes came swiftly. David Chandler, a 40-year veteran of the building industry, was armed with legislative powers to overhaul the state’s residential building sector — the RAB or Residential Apartment Buildings (Compliance and Enforcement Powers) Act — in what was called once-in-a-generation reforms.
And he wasted no time doing exactly that. The reforms included the power for Chandler to issue developers with orders to rectify serious defects before granting them an occupation certificate.
“The RAB Act was a turning point, it was an important piece of legislation which is quite unprecedented in the country…I’m the only regulator who has the powers that are in the RAB Act,” Chandler says. “It really needed to be brought in; it switched the balance to give consumers a much better standing than perhaps they have had in the past. In effect, it allows me to stop the issuance of an occupation certificate, and therefore consumers ultimately being forced to settle on their apartments.
“I use those powers very, very cautiously, but I have used them.”
Chandler also backed moves to give more power to apartment owners, pointing out that they had less consumer protection than someone buying a toaster or washing machine. To this end, he supported the creation of a ratings system for developers — the independent Construction Industry Rating Tool or iCIRT — to help homeowners arm themselves against buying apartments with defects.
Prior to this, homeowners had few, if any, resources to have defects fixed. A 2012 report by the UNSW City Futures Research Centre found 72 percent of apartment blocks in NSW had defects and in newer units it was as high as 85 percent.
An unregulated industry where tight deadlines and budgets to complete major works were written into contractual agreements between builders and sub-contractors led to cost cutting and a rise in defects.
“It was shocking,” says executive director of the Owners Corporation Network of Australia, Karen Stiles, about the state of the residential apartment sector before Chandler’s appointment.
“You had more chance of winning a $20 million lottery than you did of having a building with no defects.”
“Unfortunately most of us fall in love with the glossy brochure. That’s why iCIRT is so good. We are so used to seeing a ratings system on electrical appliances and cars but until now there has never been one on builders and developers.
“I’m hearing reports of people taking back their deposits when they discover a developer is not rated. It’s a really powerful card to play for a prospective buyer.”
Mirvac was the first major property developer to be rated on iCIRT and is the only company to have a five-star rating. Mirvac was awarded the five-star rating following a detailed, independent and rigorous review and Stiles hopes their addition will encourage other major developers to come forward and be added to it.
“Raising the standard of construction in NSW is critically important to protect purchasers and restore confidence in buying off the plan and newly built apartments,” says Mirvac’s head of residential Stuart Penklis about iCIRT.
Stephen Brell, president of the Strata Community Association of NSW, believes a new scheme called Project Intervene — which allows homeowners to bypass the courts and engage directly with a developer to fix defects with the support of NSW Fair Trading and the NSW Building Commissioner — is the most exciting new reform to come out of Chandler’s reign.
“It’s a really cost effective program and removes the often combative and expensive legal element from the process of having defects rectified,” he says.
“Before, the onus of proof was on the owners corporation, so you would spend tens of thousands of dollars to identify the defects and then tens of thousands to get it through the courts. But Project Intervene only works if the builder has not gone into receivership.”
Another positive move is the introduction of a decennial insurance product which allows owners corporations to have serious defects fixed by builders for up to 10 years after the building is first occupied. Brell says the positive changes Chandler has brought in don’t just help homeowners, but all elements of the industry, including the vast majority of honest builders who now have a way to distance themselves from the dodgy developers in the market.
With Chandler set to retire in August, there is hope that the sweeping changes he made will be upheld.
“Chandler has set up a legacy system for NSW,” says Brell. “He has a great team and two significant and brand new pieces of legislation: the Design and Building Practitioners Act and the Residential Apartment Buildings (Compliance and Enforcement Powers) Act. This will give the commissioner’s office certain powers to last beyond Chandler’s retirement.”
Chandler himself is hopeful for the future of the NSW residential apartment industry and wants to pass on this positive outlook to a new generation.
“I am (hopeful) because the industry doesn’t want to go back to where it came from,” Chandler says. “The other challenge we also have is to make sure we have tomorrow’s workforce; we were facing a situation where young people were hearing such horrendous stories about our industry that their parents were doing everything in their power to dissuade them from coming into our industry, which is a great industry.
“So we’re working with TAFE, we’re working with a whole range of employer groups to attract the next workforce, which has got to be a composition of male and female.
“If by 2025 we can lift the number of women in our industry up to 20 per cent that would be a great outcome, and if a few years down the track we can raise it to another level, that would be great.”
A long-standing cultural cruise and a new expedition-style offering will soon operate side by side in French Polynesia.
The pandemic-fuelled love affair with casual footwear is fading, with Bank of America warning the downturn shows no sign of easing.
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.”
Records keep falling in 2025 as harbourfront, beachfront and blue-chip estates crowd the top of the market.
Pure Amazon has begun journeys deep into Peru’s Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, combining contemporary design, Indigenous craftsmanship and intimate wildlife encounters in one of the richest ecosystems on Earth.
