Framing the future: The growth of Australian houses

In the heart of Melbourne this summer, the view from NGV’s backyard feels more like a postcard from the suburbs. Towering over two-stories high, a timber frame has risen out of the ground mirroring a house under construction. The ‘For Sale’ sign is already pitched out front; newly planted grass is growing; and people queue for a viewing, the faint sound of a lawnmower heard nearby.

This timber frame is an installation built by Melbourne-based architecture and design studio Breathe for the 2024 NGV Architecture Commission. Home Truth is a simulacrum of one of the 166,000 new homes forecasted to be built in Australia during 2024 to meet the country’s rapid population growth.¹Paul Ryan, ‘New home construction forecast paints tough path ahead and time is running out to get things on track’, Realestate.com.au, April 17, 2024, https://www.realestate.com.au/insights/new-home-construction-forecast-paints-tough-path-ahead-and-time-is-running-out-to-get-things-on-track-2/ It is not only representative of the ballooning suburban silhouette; it also takes up the area of a typical Australian suburban house, coming in at around 236 square metres.

The average Australian detached house ranks among the largest in the world, surpassing the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Canada, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.² Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘Average Floor Area of New Residential Dwellings’, ABS, 12 April 2023, https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/average-floor-area-new-residential-dwellings This is a significant increase from the four-room, 100-square-metre timber cottage of the early twentieth century, and the 165-square-metre villas of the 1980s.³McMullan, Michael & Robert Fuller, ‘Spatial growth in Australian homes (1960–2010)’, Australian Planner, 52(4), 2015, pp. 314–25. Upsizing includes additional bedrooms, bathrooms and living spaces. There’s also the cinema room, powder room, walk-in wardrobe, butler pantry and al-fresco dining.

The desire for more space reflects the demand of many Australians to have a private place for their chosen and biological families. Embedded in this desire, is the subtle aspiration to keep individual family members separate from each other within the interior, especially for work and study.⁴In this growth; however, average household sizes have decreased, along with the amount of private open space.

The villa is not only a shelter for an atomised family, for many it is also a tax shelter wrapped in brick veneer of capital gains tax exemptions and negative gearing. By the end of the 1980s, this had cemented the house as a key source of individual wealth in Australia. In fact, housing is now a social safety net, with governments withdrawing from universal welfare and public housing provision. The domination of housing as a source of wealth feeds into the desire for more space. Adding an extra bathroom may increase a property’s value by $50,000 to $100,000. Size is a blunt tool to achieve capital growth. This makes investing in the growth of housing as ‘safe as houses’.

While the desire for larger homes is driven by both personal and financial motivations, this trend has significant environmental repercussions. Australian houses are not only the largest in the world, they are also behind international standards for environmental sustainability. The supersized house requires a proportionally larger amount of material to build and more energy to heat, cool and light. It is also decreasing biodiversity by replacing grasslands, forests and farms with asphalt and concrete.

‘The good news’, say Breathe, ‘is that the easiest thing we can do to reduce our carbon footprint is build less’. Home Truth brings home the message about Australia’s ever-growing housing market and its ever-growing villas. It confronts audiences with a tall stud frame that stands as a striking representation of a house in mid-construction, offering a glimpse into the skeletal form that underpins every home. The structure remains raw and unfinished, a literal stripping away of the facade of the typical suburban home. As visitors pass through the garage door of the house, they move through a voluminous maze of rooms and corridors. As visitors circumambulate, they hear sounds of suburbia composed by Byron J. Scullin. The disorienting nature of the experience quickly reveals itself and one can almost imagine the walls closing in.

Nestled inside the labyrinth-like house is a quiet, reflective timber volume that depicts the footprint of a smaller-scale dwelling of 50 square metres. The meditative wooden retreat presents a physical and intellectual point of reflection for visitors, a glimpse into an alternative housing future. With this babushka-doll-like move, Breathe lay out the two polar ends of the housing market: the suburban villa and the studio apartment. This provocation is not suggesting that you move into a tiny home (although you can, if you want to). Instead, the project invites audiences into a space that questions the ethical and ecological impact of the very large homes commonly being built around Australia.

How much do you need? What are you prepared to give up? Can having ‘less’ be desirable?

The strategy of doing less – or a game of subtraction from what a home needs – Breathe know very well. This is encapsulated in its 2013 housing project, The Commons, which set a new benchmark for sustainable living in Melbourne. Developed with Small Giants, The Commons is a five-storey apartment building and an exemplar for environmental standards with a 7.5 star energy rating (and an energy footprint roughly one quarter of a typical two-bedroom suburban house).⁵Ward, Maitiu, Andrew Wuttke & Urban Angles, ‘The Commons’, Architecture Australia, 104(1), 2015, pp. 84–91. This was achieved through the removal of several elements oft-demanded by the market. There are no carparks, individual laundries, second bathrooms, air-conditioning, plasterboard ceilings, imported timbers, or high-spec embellishments. These individual demands are replaced with collective amenity, reducing the construction costs, which subsequently reduced the costs of the apartments relative to those of comparable size – which goes against the model of market-driven development where the goal is to maximise the final sales price.

Breathe discovered a category overlooked by the market. That is, people who are prepared to trade off space, high-end appliances and finishes for better sustainability. Architecture critic Andrew Mackenzie reported on this success, stating that:

‘Twenty-two of the twenty-four units sold off the plan. The buyers were mostly under 40, predominantly singles and couples who paid from $390,000 to $590,000 by 2013 for one and two-bedroom apartments, bigger than the norm.’⁶Andrew Mackenzie, ‘The inner-city apartment revolution: think rooftop vegie patches and beehives’, The Age, 25 August 2017, https://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/the-innercity-apartment-revolution-think-rooftop-vegie-patches-and-beehives-20170823-gy2boh.html.

Its success was not only through market approval, but through a recognition of the quality design. In 2014, The Commons won the Australian Institute of Architecture’s Victorian Architecture Award and the National Architecture Award, in both the Multiple Housing and Sustainable Architecture categories. The project also went on to win a further ten state and national awards, becoming a beacon for change in the multiple-housing sector.

This attitude of rethinking the status quo is at the core of Breathe’s practice. Through advocacy and activism, the studio identifies broader opportunities for architects to transform the built environment, championing better housing policies and environmental standards. They are the driving force behind the Nightingale Housing model, a not-for-profit organisation that seeks to revolutionise the housing market by prioritising affordability, sustainability and community, through scaling and improving on the lessons of The Commons. They have also developed a range of guides that offer accessible introductions to sustainable building design, all of which are free to read, share and copy from their website.

Home Truth provokes a discussion on the size of Australian homes and the possibility of more compact living. There is a lack of meaningful discussion in Australia regarding housing types, including their design, construction methods, delivery processes and ownership models that could promote a greater adoption of higher-density housing. The focus of the real estate and property market remains fixated on the number of people per square metre, how big a villa, how much it sells for, or how many townhouses or apartments one can fit on a block of land. It is almost never about how people occupy space, bettering the quality urban environments, or the new public spaces that could be produced. This is compounded by the fact that experiences of density have been variable. Sadly, in Australia, many people have seen density done badly. People have become anxious about how living closely will impact upon their individual amenity. And they are rightly concerned. Local communities have been shut out of decision-making on how neighbourhoods can support more housing.

Architecture exhibitions, often as one-to-one scale models and installations, can demonstrate other possible ways of living. One needs to both feel and see it. Look around the city, too. There are many precedents out there. Great housing has existed across Melbourne in numerous forms over past centuries. In the late 1800s terrace housing delivered great density and a sense of community and life on the streets. In the 1930s low-rise buildings like Cairo Flats, designed by architect Acheson Best Overend, delivered north facing ‘bachelor apartments’ on the city’s doorstep for working single men in just 25 square metres.

From 1947 to the late 1970s, the Small Homes Service (SHS) delivered affordable, architect-designed houses for just 100 square metres. Advertised in The Age, you could turn up at department store Myer on the weekend, meet the SHS director Robin Boyd and buy blueprints for five quid. In the 60s, 70s and 80s, Merchant Builders, founded by David Yencken and John Ridge, also delivered quality housing and landscape choices to the market.

In the twenty-first century, Melbourne-based architects continue to deliver smart housing ideas ready for the market. Future Homes is an initiative of the state government which sells three-storey apartment building plans, suitable for planning permits, for $150 (a special rate at the time of writing). These plans were conceived with LIAN, Spiral Architects Lab, McGregor Westlake Architecture and Design Strategy Architecture in collaboration with Includesign. All these experimentations advocate for a gentle density, quality housing and more compact living spaces.

By drawing attention to precedents for smaller-scale housing, Breathe highlight how their proposal is not part of some unattainable imagined future, but a continuation of a thoughtful and appropriate scale of living that responds to the needs of others and the planet. The installation prompts reflection on how a smaller-scale architecture can foster more sustainable, higher-quality and community-oriented living environments. Home Truth reminds us to reconsider what we value: Can you do more with less? Is less enough?

Architect and critic Pier Vittorio Aureli also asks this question in his pamphlet Less is enough, 2013. He wonders if it’s possible to create an alternative world where we demand less, consume less, possess less. This fancy is not a return to the aesthetics of minimalism, a capitulation to austerity, nor does it revisit the ideological impulses of architectural modernism. In an uncharacteristically twee moment for the critic, Aureli ponders whether by possessing less, we will have the tendency to share more and be satisfied in doing so.

I wonder if this is of interest to the increasingly atomised society Australia has become since the 1980s. Breathe understand that environmental responsibility and quality design can be prime catalysts to turn individuals towards a collective movement, by visualising alternatives and building them. In doing so, the occupants of these dwellings do more for the planet with less.

Dr Timothy Moore is NGV Curator Design and Architecture / Melbourne Design Week

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