“Little boxes on the hillside / Little boxes made of ticky tacky / Little boxes, little boxes / Little boxes all the same. / There's a green one and a pink one / And a blue one and a yellow one / And they're all made out of ticky tacky/ And they all look just the same.”

A song by Malvina Reynolds, American folk/blues singer-songwriter and political activist, recorded in 1962, but made famous by US folk singer Pete Seeger. Inspired by Daly City in California.

The detached home on its own titled site remains the most popular form of housing in Australia, not only by numbers (in Sydney and Melbourne where apartments flourish, 50% of all dwellings are still freestanding homes), but in the psyche.

Protected by groups such as ‘Save Our Suburbs’, they are the mainstay of popular culture, in movies like ‘The Castle’ or TV shows like ‘Kath and Kim’. It is the signature home in the Australian imagination.

In the past few weeks, we have looked at the how the vast majority, perhaps 80%, of all new detached homes in Australia came to be project homes, built in brick veneer. For 50 years, house starts have averaged about 56,000 annually (from a low of 30,000 in the 80s to several highs of 70,000 recently). Lately this surged to 88,445 as a result of HomeBuilder. Despite this popularity, the project home is not to everyone’s taste, particularly to a cultivated design palette. But where are the designs at now? The answer may surprise you.

Let's say that you want to build project homes. You need to address three things: placement, plans and presentation.

Placement

This refers to the niche within the industry that a home addresses. By far the largest portion is new houses on flat sites on the outskirts of the major cities, as we saw with A.V. Jennings in the 60s and 70s. That continues to be where the largest cohort of the biggest project home builders work today, in ‘house and land packages’.

But there are niche areas that builders have diversified into recently, such as ‘knock down / re-build or KDRB’ where homes within established inner suburbs are demolished and replaced with a new house, often a duplex or multi-generational home, as we shall see. Other niches include building on difficult, sloping or steep sites, or on bushfire or flood prone land. These are often ‘one-off’ builds with greater customisation than you might expect from ‘volume’ builders.

Plans

Having decided the placement of your homes, you need a ‘plan range’. Detached home plans have three major components: a kitchen / dining / living (KDL) area; bedrooms (together or divided) and car parking. There are only so many ways in which these three or four components can be arranged, as explored by Ed Gurney’s early plans for A.V. Jennings: a central corridor, with bedrooms to one side and living rooms to the other.

In 2014 environa studio surveyed all the plans of five major contemporary project home builders to see what variations in typology they had created. In summary, it is remarkably few. The room dimensions are predominantly the same, moreover the arrangements fall into similar types summarised in this diagram, that shows the four basic single storey types and three double storey types.

Within the single storey plans we studied there are interesting variations. The KDL can be placed beside the garage or more commonly behind the garage with the bedrooms on the other side. In some cases, bedrooms are at the front of the house and the KDL across the back. The difference to older plans is the incorporation of a larger garage. This is a pictorial summary of the three most common types:

The double storey plans are more consistent with only three typologies. The square and narrow types have the KDL downstairs, a central staircase to bedrooms at the four corners of upstairs, with bathrooms between. A third variation has a bedroom downstairs and a smaller upper plan, seen here:

The biggest plan change from the project homes of fifty, even thirty, years ago is the addition, in both single and double storey types, of a covered outdoor space, an outdoor room, patio, or ‘al fresco’ in advertising parlance. This key space off the living area, equipped with a BBQ, then extends into the garden where display homes have taken the lessons on ‘Burkes Backyard’ and the ABC’s ‘Gardening Australia’, and turned it up to eleven.

One consistent approach is the continuation of the ‘open plan’, with no walls dividing different spaces. This results not from modernist principles, but rather the design and layout of these houses is in response to their largest customer base: young families buying their first house. At this stage in family life children want to be close to the parents and vice versa, so a kitchen at the centre of the living rooms is often seen as the best arrangement for interaction with children. Hence open plan.

Australia has built a vast number of houses for this one purchaser age, but the open plan is exhausted within a few years as children become teenagers and greater acoustic privacy is needed. The parents desire not just a separate bedroom and bathroom, but it needs to be in a separate wing; and they like more bedrooms for children or visitors. Or nanny or paying guest.

Having moved beyond an open-plan home, this describes the purchaser’s second or third house, often a KDRB. Some entrepreneurial builders, finding standard plans for young families on greenfield sites no longer fitted their customer’s requirements, developed more closed and cellular plans.

These expanded into ‘multi -generational homes’ for three, maybe four, generations, common in southern European and Asian families (where Australia’s immigrants have traditionally come from). This ‘new-old’ form of house now resonates as an economic necessity when both parents are breadwinners.

To be able to afford the mortgage and life costs the grandparents chip in money for their own attached flat – so they look after the grandchildren until the grandchildren can look after them. Now called ‘ageing in place’, it might surprise how many project home builders have employed architects / designers to meet these needs. This response to life changes is where new plans are developing.

Presentation

The form of a project home is almost entirely determined by the ‘street presentation’. All the advertising is in the front elevation, and through those ads we can track the quite significant changes that have taken place in the last ten years. We can trace some in these images of one storey houses:

The traditional brick veneer house with dark tiles gradually gives way to lighter colours and tiles (urban heat island concerns). Given the difficulties with the porosity of brick veneer and finding bricklayers, further changes are made in materials. Bricks are replaced by ‘Autoclaved Aerated Concrete’ (AAC), cement sheet panels and a variety of FC finishes. Often passed off as a Hamptons’ look.

These material changes are then combined with flatter opposing skillion roof forms, replacing tiles with metal. There are insufficient of these houses to substantially change the public's perception of project homes, but any visitor to display homes (called ‘show homes’ in NZ) will notice the changes and improvements in the way the homes are presented.

Likewise double storey houses have undergone similar changes, reduced face veneer brickwork and dark tiles replaced with metal; more recently display homes have modern or contemporary flat roofs hidden behind parapets.

As part of our study of evolving project home presentations we formulated cosmetic changes that could be introduced, to ‘localise’ the house in four different Council areas of Sydney (in areas starting with W). This is what we developed over the same house plan:

In conclusion

Many architectural aesthetes hold a jaundiced view of the project homes. They see no diversion from a customer desire for quantity over quality; little change to the ideas of sixty years ago, with only a more open-plan added to a central corridor with rooms on both sides, triple-fronted in brick veneer with lumpen tile roof forms. The epitome of ‘Little Boxes’.

And certainly, many of the foundations established by A.V. Jennings endure: mortgages on house construction contracts; land and housing packages; estate construction with display homes and ‘value for money’. But it is also the case that much has changed. There are radical, if subtle, changes in placement, plans, and presentation.

There is greater diversity in builders’ offerings for unusual or difficult sites, more efficient plans, ‘knock-down re-builds’, and multi-generational homes. Moreover, construction techniques may have improved over time: waffle-pan slabs replace beamed slabs or timber-framed flooring; more joinery and less plasterboard; render over brick or AAC; more metal roofs, in better forms, than tiles; more prefabrication and sensible standardisation.

The innovations in project homes are being driven in part by design responses to customers. The new choices are attractive to purchasers, never mind that the choices are limited, within a constrained range. There are a multitude of colours, finishes and individual styling within a limited palette. They don’t see ‘Little Boxes’; rather, in the words of NZ’s David Mitchell, they see their house in colour, everyone else’s’ in black and white.

Project homes are still the cheapest form of construction, which can be everything in purchasing a new or first home. It is repetitious, but a ‘mass produced house’ will always be far cheaper than a customised one-off house designed by an architect, where costs are ten times per square metre, or more. One tenth cheaper. Customers (as opposed to clients) see far better value. That is something mainstream architects have ignored for too long.

Where do we go to from here? What are tomorrow’s project homes? This, and other issues, will be covered in next week's discussion

Tone Wheeler is principal architect at Environa Studio, Adjunct Professor at UNSW and is President of the Australian Architecture Association. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and are not held or endorsed by A+D, the AAA or UNSW. Tone does not read Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Linked In. Sanity is preserved by reading and replying only to comments addressed to toneontuesday@gmail.com

Tone Wheeler

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