Sustainable House Day: six of the best houses to see

Opening up 125 private houses across Australia on Sunday, September 11, for the 15th annual Sustainable House Day allows the eco-interested to see the many variations on the theme of living in an energy conservative way.

With properties spread from Queensland to Western Australia and Tasmania, and a large proportion of those in regional areas, some extraordinarily different expressions of how to do the good life in a good way are on view.

In Glenhope, near Redesdale in central Victoria, is Clearwind, a four-bedroom home that in the mid-1980s was built beneath the vast canopy of a hayshed.

Owners Clare Claydon and Wim Westerhoff didn’t construct the house. They bought it for its quirkiness, for 16 hectares of hobby farm horse paddocks, and for the scope that huge roof gave them to go solar powered.

They quickly layered on 12 solar panels, which return so much free power they sell the excess to the grid for a bonus $1000 of income per year. “We keep ourselves and the farm in electricity,” says Claydon.

If Clearwind is unapologetically rustic – down to its big and productive vegie garden and orchard – White Pebble House in Melbourne’s Hampton is all white, high-end and Modernist.

Interior designer Frances Cosway and partner Neil Dicker made themselves a sophisticated house and garden worthy of the cover of an architectural glossy. They specified its performance up to a 7.3 star energy rating. Last year, White Pebble House duly won Bayside Council’s Best Ecological Sustainable Design award.

In Mundaring, east of Perth, “Phil and Donna’s House” is presented as “no frills” but it operates with a souped-up 8.1 star energy rating.

In Ironbark, South Australia, is the self-sufficient community building with internal vegie patch. There is also a one-bedroom B&B that makes “Earthship”, constructed of walls made out of 1000 recycled car tyres covered in rammed earth, well able to pay its way.

As all the diverse strawbale, Hempcrete, heavily-insulated, rigorously-recycled, low-maintenance and high performance housing in the open day listings demonstrate, sustainability is no longer owned by the dark green fringe dwellers but is now so mainstream that most of the homes in this year’s mix are where ordinary, down-home Australian families live on a preferred energetic shoestring.

The Second Hand Cottage in Sydney’s suburban Alexandria so successfully re-deployed so much building material bought through websites such as Gumtree, or found in skips or on roadsides that the build budget came out at an improbable $150,000.

A suburban standard, ’60s brick veneer in Foster, Victoria, a house type notorious for leaking heat, was retrofitted last year for $40,000 with serious amounts of insulation and double-glazed windows.

Organised each year by the Alternative Technology Association, or ATA, and attended by up to 15,000 people, the Australia-wide showcase of green roofs, green gardens and energy-miserly homes and buildings, is about inspiration by walk-through contact with the places and with the people who have built or refitted them.

Access to the properties is either free or by gold coin donation. But to obtain the addresses, those wanting to participate need to register ahead of September 11 at sustainablehouseday.com.