Name: Gresford Architects
Price range: $

Modern house with wooden cladding, large windows, and solar panels on the roof, set in a green garden with trees, architecture by Gresford Architects.

Modern living room with wooden walls and ceiling, glass sliding doors, a large plant, bookshelves, and a small black and brown kitten; architecture by Gresford Architects.

A modern garden with lush plants and a pink flamingo sculpture, visible through a glass wall, with an indoor bookshelf and furniture, architecture by Gresford Architects.

Interior view of a modern home with colourful wood-paneled walls, framed artwork, and a glimpse of a dining area, architecture by Gresford Architects.

A cozy bedroom with a large window looking out onto greenery, a wooden sideboard, a painting on the wall, and a sloped ceiling, architecture by Gresford Architects.

A modern wooden house facade with a large window featuring vertical blinds, surrounded by a flower garden, architecture by Gresford Architects.

A bright living room with large glass windows overlooking a garden and countryside, furnished with modern sofas, a glass coffee table, and indoor plants, architecture by Gresford Architects.

Kitchen with large window overlooking greenery, plants on the counter, and artwork on the dark-paneled wall, architecture by Gresford Architects.

A modern wooden house with a gabled roof and rectangular windows, set against a clear sky and surrounded by greenery, architecture by Gresford Architects

A wooden house with a metal roof surrounded by lush trees and greenery, with an open window, architecture by Gresford Architects.

The Old Orchard is a certified EnerPHIT retrofit of an existing 1960’s bungalow, which was in itself extended and remodelled in the 1980’s. EnerPHIT is the Passivhaus retrofit standard, but there is also a fundamental focus on the reuse of as much of the existing fabric as possible, so as to ensure that elements of the existing building with a high level of embodied carbon — such as screed, blockwork walls, concrete lintels etc — were all left undisturbed and thus drive down the carbon footprint as low as possible.

The house was extended at first floor level, using the existing walls and foundations, and then externally insulated (the house now performs so well there is no separate heating system) and clad in Western Red Cedar, which was harvested from trees that grew on the site and were felled and machined at the beginning of the project. Internally, we took more liberties with the existing stud walls, and rearranged the interior around a series of coloured wooden boxes, inspired by a Kimono pattern from the clients time living in Japan. The living spaces of the ground floor flow freely around the coloured boxes, which are separated by pocket sliding doors and as you move through the house the colours of the boxes rustle and shimmer in the light, like the languid rustle of the Kimono’s that inspired them. Conversely, the roof is of powder coated corrugated steel, and the veranda, timber and roof draw strongly on the clients Australian heritage.