Lia's House

Ecosystem house / With Joost Bakker / 2024

Spec

Kind: ecosystem house

With: Joost Bakker

Completed: 2024

Joost is a tireless innovator. He has a way of inventing things that seem completely mad until you realise they make perfect sense and in fact, it might be everyone else who is mad for making buildings as though we had a spare planet in our back pocket.

Joost stoked me to imagine what the world might be like if every new home created rewilding habitat, sequestered carbon dioxide, was resistant to bushfire, and provided enough energy, food and water to support a family while generating zero waste.

This home is a fundamental rethinking of how we construct buildings to create a future where the creation of human habitats heals us and heals our planet.

The green roof is a wicking bed, holding 50mm of water in the base to ensure plants always have enough water to thrive, as well as insulating the building thermally and acoustically.

This means the roof detains stormwater, reducing flood risk and relieving pressure from the civic stormwater system.

Water is the best insulator, providing acoustic and thermal benefits. The soil roof protects the building from radiant heat and embers in a bushfire. The house remains remarkably cool on the hottest of summer days.

The house is built upside down — the weight of the soil on the roof acts as a ballast, removing the need to pin the building down with concrete footings, saving cost and C02 emissions. Money that would normally go to concrete in the ground can go toward soil and plants for the roof. The construction site is a garden from day 3.

The walls and ceilings are made from the world's most wasted resource, straw, compressed into hard panels. As well as insulating the home thermally and acoustically, these straw panels are completely non-toxic, VOC-free, compostable at end-of-life and lock up over 22,000kg of C02 in the walls and ceilings. They also protect the home from bushfire and dampen external sound.

The standard external wall panels conform to industry standard 1200mm centres, meaning zero offcuts, reducing construction waste and making installation very rapid. Offcuts from internal wall linings and ceilings are made from straw and are used in the compost. There was no site skip bin on this build and no waste taken to landfill.

The facade is coated with a cork-based product made from the leftover cork in the production of wine bottle corks. With the addition of lime and diatamaceous earth, the facade is naturally anti-fungal and mould resistant, while being completely natural and toxin-free.

This is the first 100% Australian-grown hemp kitchen. Industrial hemp grows up to 4 metres tall in just 90 days, making it a great rotational crop for farmers. It sequesters carbon-dioxide faster than any other plant we grow and creates the strongest of plant fibres, making it ideal for high performance boards. I hope the growth of this industry helps use preserve more forests for biodiversity and ecosystem services.

The checkered splashbacks are made by Lachlan Chapman from broken skateboards.