On a sliver of land in Sydney, architect Adam Haddow’s 69m\u00b2 playful brick house is a luxurious experiment in living with less.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While occupying a spacious rooftop apartment, Haddow came to the realisation that he and his husband were only living in a third of it. Could they downsize and make their lives better in the process, he wondered.<\/p>\n
The multi-level house on a three-by-ten metre block has one bedroom, a study, a kitchen, lounge and rooftop garden. Intelligent design creates a sense of space where actual space is lacking.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A tiny courtyard wraps around a tree-fern which appears to shoot out from the side of the building, a skylight above a plant-filled shower creates wonder and connection with the outdoors.<\/p>\n
Haddow, who is also the national president of the Australian Institute of Architects, says the house shows that “you could have the luxury of a large dwelling but with a really small footprint”.<\/p>\n
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Adam Haddow’s house in inner-city Sydney. Haddow is director at SJB architecture firm and the national president of the Australian Institute of Architects. (Supplied: SJB)<\/p>\n
When the house won the 2023 Robin Boyd Award for Residential Architecture, the judges called Haddow’s house<\/a> a “spectacular example of a new approach to urban infill” at a time when the country “needs to move beyond the Australian tradition of the four-bedroom, standalone house being our only residential offering”.\u00a0<\/p>\n “There’s a big lesson in this building about letting go, about understanding that storage is really helpful but actually not having so much stuff in the first place, not having so much building in the first place, is releasing, it’s liberating,” architecture guru Kevin Mcleod told ABC’s Grand Designs Australia<\/a> when he visited the building.<\/p>\n While the dreamy residence responds to calls to increase housing density in existing suburbs, its price tag is out of reach for many.<\/p>\n But some experts are arguing that building smaller houses could lower prices and speed up the building process.<\/p>\n Architecture critic Elizabeth Farrelly once said Australian houses were big because people were greedy.\u00a0<\/p>\n “We’re all taught to want as much as we can possibly get,” she told a Sydney Morning Herald<\/a> reporter in 2003.<\/p>\n “We’ll see bigger and bigger bedrooms, more rumpus rooms, studios and studies and Christ knows what \u2013 it will go on as long as people can have it,” Farrelly said.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the two decades since that comment, household size \u2013 the number of people living together under one roof \u2013 has continued to decline<\/a> while Australia has kept building among the biggest houses in the world.<\/p>\n Data released yesterday by property research firm Cotality<\/a> shows more than 60 per cent of households are made up of just one or two people, while the highest share of housing has three bedrooms.\u00a0<\/p>\n But amid a housing affordability and supply crisis, and the need to decarbonise, some people are asking themselves the question: how much space do I need?\u00a0<\/p>\n Why the obsession with space?<\/p>\n Haddow believes Australia\u2019s obsession with a “forever home” has driven us to build dwellings larger than we need.\u00a0<\/p>\n The average floor area of newly built detached houses in Australia is 232m\u00b2 (this includes garages when they are within the roof of the dwelling), according to the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics<\/a> data. This is a slight decrease from the 2008 peak of 246m\u00b2.\u00a0<\/p>\n When people think about their future requirements, in their mind they \u201cneed more and more [space] to be able to sustain living there\u201d Haddow says. Stamp duty has also played a role, he says. \u201cWhen you move, you\u2019re paying stamp duty all over again. That does start to weigh on people’s minds and they essentially look for a bigger house when they start.\u201d<\/p>\n In Australia\u2019s booming property market, where a house is not only a place to live but an investment, larger houses are seen to be more appetising to the next buyer, Haddow says.\u00a0<\/p>\n Architect wants us to rethink house sizes<\/a><\/p>\n In the throes of a climate and cost-of-living crisis, Breathe Architecture founder Jeremy McLeod says it’s time for Australia to rethink it’s unsustainable housing design ‘failure’.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dr Julie Collins, the Director and Curator of the Architecture Museum at the University of South Australia, agrees. She says the number of bedrooms, bathrooms and parking spaces have become a shorthand measure of real estate value.<\/p>\n In the 20th century, Australia followed American trends towards larger bungalows in suburbia after wartime austerity measures limited the size of new builds until the early 1950s, Dr Collins says. (These days the average new house is roughly double the size of a house built in the 1950s.)\u00a0<\/p>\n Open plan living also led to larger homes because it \u201ccreated the need for extra rooms where we\u2019ve got acoustic privacy\u201d, she says. Suddenly, TV rooms and butlers\u2019 pantries began appearing.\u00a0<\/p>\n There are other drivers too. Property Council Chief Executive Mike Zorbas says young adults remaining in their parents\u2019 home longer, as well as working from home, has created appetite among buyers for home offices, gyms and additional living areas.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sue Schlesinger\u00a0and Lissanne Oliver of Sorted! (ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens)<\/p>\n Could you live with less?<\/p>\n Sue Schlesinger misses having a patch of grass to call her own.\u00a0<\/p>\n When she downsized from a four-bedroom family home to an apartment three years ago, she missed her backyard most. But there are positives to vertical living. \u201cI like the view out to the west of Melbourne, I like seeing the sunsets and I like seeing the weather coming in,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Schlesinger is well versed in letting go of things. She hired professional organiser Lissanne Oliver to help declutter her house after her husband died, as well as sort several deceased estates she was responsible for. \u201cAnything I’ve moved on, I have not missed,\u201d she says. \u201cEach time I felt lighter.\u201d<\/p>\n Sue Schlesinger\u00a0and Lissanne Oliver of Sorted! (ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens)<\/p>\n Lately, Oliver has been helping Schlesinger digitise old VHS tapes and other family memorabilia. Oliver exudes energy and warmth. She doesn\u2019t work with people with hoarding behaviours; she works with what she calls “garden variety homes”.\u00a0<\/p>\n Her role, she says, is to ask her clients the right questions to help them decide what they might like to keep or part with or store differently. In almost every case the result is more space. A room that isn\u2019t used because it\u2019s full of excess belongings is costly, she says. “In my neighbourhood, that cost is roughly $250,000 \u2013 between a one- and two-bedroom apartment.”<\/p>\n Oliver doesn’t know if there\u2019s a simple answer to the relationship between belongings and house size. Does a desire to store belongings leads people to live in bigger spaces or do people simply fill bigger spaces with more belongings? She\u2019s seen it all. But she thinks a simple question people could ask themselves is: “What would you actually put in your space if your house burnt down, what would you go and replace?”<\/p>\n How big is too big?<\/p>\n Haddow believes Australians are starting to think about space differently.<\/p>\n He says there\u2019s a shift towards “landscape as luxury” and this was helped along by the pandemic.\u00a0\u201cWhat has happened in the last \u202650 years, is that houses have got bigger, and the sites have got smaller,\u201d he says. \u201c[That has] really deteriorated your outdoor living space and your garden space.\u201d People are starting to realise that outdoor space is a necessity, and he believes that will lead to smaller houses.<\/p>\n Housing research and property economist Cameron Kusher\u00a0believes building smaller homes could lower house prices and shorten the time it takes to build new homes. “When the pandemic hit, there was this massive escalation in construction costs, now that escalation has slowed but those prices aren\u2019t coming down, so it now costs a lot more to build the same houses we were building five or six years ago,” he recently told ABC\u2019s The Business<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n “Maybe we need to go back to how things were 30, 40 years ago where you had smaller homes and you make them easy to renovate so over time people can actually add bedrooms, add bathrooms, add carparks, add verandas and all these sorts of things to add value to the home,” he said. The fact houses appreciate at a faster pace than other options also influence peoples desires to buy larger homes upfront, he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n For home buyers willing to live in apartments, the shortage of well-designed, family-friendly apartments<\/a>, remains a constraint. Australia has some of the least dense cities in the world. Increasing housing density by constructing what\u2019s often called “the missing middle” – units, town houses and semi-detached homes \u2013 in existing suburbs\u00a0has been proposed as a sustainable way to help meet Australia\u2019s housing shortage<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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