Loading Here, Good Weekend profiles three sustainable estates that are challenging old assumptions: The Cape, in Cape Paterson on Victoria’s south-east coast, is showing how you can ditch fossil fuels and high bills on an affordable, mass-market budget. The Mullum Creek estate is pushing these principles at the housing market’s higher end. And Narara, on the NSW Central Coast, is showing how a community can run a multimillion-dollar estate with an unusual decision-making system. Cape Paterson Tad Hendry remembers when he first heard about a developer who wanted to build a housing estate on the edge of Cape Paterson, a sleepy beach town of less than 1000 people that lies two hours’ drive south-east of Melbourne. It was back in 2004, and the resentful locals had just witnessed some remnant heathland vanish under another batch of new bricks and mortar. “I was one of the lynch mob who wanted to hang him up from the nearest tree for ruining our little hamlet,” Hendry recalls. But then this developer called a public meeting, and started talking about passive solar homes. “It was music to my ears,” says Hendry, a building designer. “I’d been building those sorts of homes for years.” A genial bloke who loves to yarn, he backed the developer and fought for the 230-home project against a small but determined group of local objectors. “It was myself and seven or so grey-haired old women,” says Hendry, 60, himself quite grey. He’s sitting at his dining table in his house at The Cape, the development he once scorned, where he now lives with wife Karen and daughter Jaz.

It’s a sunny day in late July and chilly: 13 degrees, with biting sea breezes outside. But inside this 8.7-star super-energy-efficient house, it’s 22 degrees. The heater remains off, as it almost always is (this is true of the other 22 houses built so far at The Cape, and in summer airconditioners are barely touched). Hendry, whose business Adapt Design Group has designed 10 of The Cape’s existing or planned houses, says his last quarterly winter energy bill was $3.65, but annually he’s in negative bill territory, with his solar panels generating a net income of $100. “I just laugh when I hear the federal government talking about high energy prices,” he says. Brendan Condon, the developer of the Cape Paterson estate, south-east of Melbourne. Credit:Meredith O'Shea The man Hendry initially fancied stringing up a tree is my friend Brendan Condon. He’s an unlikely developer. He studied criminology, took a break to work as a labourer building skyscrapers, then worked with young offenders after finishing his degree. He went on to co-found a revegetation company, Australian Ecosystems, building it into a multimillion-dollar business with 60 staff. The company designed and planted the bulk of the wetlands around Melbourne’s ever-expanding tiled sea of new housing estates. But Condon became convinced those estates were leaving a poor legacy for residents and the environment. Loading Under national building regulations, new homes must have an energy-efficiency rating of at least six stars, but multiple studies have now found they often fall short in their actual performance for various reasons, including a lack of testing as well as rorting. The homes leak heat in winter and, with their lack of shading and dark roofs, are summer hot-boxes. “They need a lot of airconditioning to keep people healthy and comfortable,” Condon says. In other words, bad design leads to reliance on airconditioning, which leads to more greenhouse gases and big bills. With hotter days coming down the climate pipeline, people then need even more airconditioning. “We really needed to build a project on a scale that the industry would take note of,” Condon says of The Cape. “We didn’t want to build mudbrick homes or yurts. We wanted to build mainstream houses.”

It wasn’t easy. The Cape approached the local council, which had never seen anything like it, and the electricity supplier was flummoxed by the modelling that showed how little energy the homes needed. The local objectors scored a triumph when a planning panel knocked back the proposal. Holding on to the land cost a fortune in interest bills, which weighed heavily on Condon. Then the project’s local supporters mobilised and the council deferred a final decision to the state government, which approved it. The ethical investment outfit Small Giants, run by Berry Liberman and Danny Almagor, joined foundation investor Mike O’Mullane, and financially backed the development phase, just as they had with The Commons in inner Melbourne, which became a landmark sustainable apartment complex. When I last visited The Cape several years ago, only two houses stood. Now they’ve multiplied and all are innovative for Australia, where we tend to build houses with the thermal efficiency of grass huts. Driving into the estate reveals a scene from Grand Designs writ large: naked concrete slabs, clusters of utes and tool-belted tradies. The estate and its homes have won 17 design, architecture and sustainability awards. Each of The Cape’s first 23 homes – there will be 230 by 2025 – averages over eight stars. Ten stars means you virtually need no heating and cooling, while an eight-star rating means the houses are using about half the energy for heating and cooling compared to a six-star home in the same climate zone. When you fit out the homes with solar and battery storage – plus the latest energy-efficient appliances, including very low-energy heat pumps for hot water and reverse-cycle airconditioning – they pull from the electricity grid just 5 per cent of the energy used by a new six-star gas-and-electric home. What this means is The Cape houses have become bill-slayers. Residents are averaging energy bills of $500 a year, often less, compared to about $2430 for a new six-star Victorian home of the same size. Tad Hendry in front of his home at Cape Paterson. “I just laugh when I hear the government talking about high energy prices,” he says. Credit:Meredith O'Shea

Before a sod was turned at The Cape, Condon recruited some of Australia’s most respected architects and designers specialising in environmentally friendly homes and asked them to design 10 houses. But there was a catch: they had to allow plans to be publicly available online. One architect refused and left. The 10 plans were then reviewed by some of Australia’s leading energy-efficiency experts, a local builder from Wonthaggi, TS Constructions, and a team of designers. Construction at The Cape estate began in 2014, and the house designs, which now number 14, have since been downloaded 40,000 times. “I ran into a bloke at the pub in Hamilton [south-west Victoria] the other day,” says Condon, “He’d downloaded the nine-star house and built it.” Land buyers don’t have to choose from the 14 plans, but they often blend designs, then customise. The rules: houses must rate at least 7.5 stars, be no bigger than 200 square metres (most are 160, with three bedrooms, an office and two bathrooms), and they must have at least 2.5 kilowatts of rooftop solar and a 10,000-litre water tank. There are no gas connections; highly responsive induction cooktops are fitted instead. We knock on the door of one sleek, modern house and a smiling man dressed in neat, casual clothes opens the door. “Welcome to my energy freedom house,” says Joe Spano. He’s referring to his divorce from fossil fuels (which he intends to mark by framing his final petrol receipt). He shows us his iPad on the kitchen bench. “I always love watching this,” he says. It’s a depiction of his home’s current energy use. It shows that the rooftop solar panels are now generating 3.3 kilowatts of power. He’s using 2.2 kilowatts to charge his 449-kilometre-range Hyundai Kona Highlander electric car in the garage, plus 0.3 kilowatts to run the washing machine. Meanwhile, 0.4 kilowatts is charging his house battery and another 0.4 kilowatts is being exported to the grid. (Sometimes tiny amounts are drawn from the grid, but Spano offsets that with green electricity retailer Momentum Energy.) “Not bad for a winter’s day,” he says. The design principles that make Spano’s home 8.3 stars are common across The Cape. They are not new concepts or rocket science. First, the houses face north, so the low winter sun streams through double-glazed windows. The floor is usually a low-carbon polished concrete mix (about 8 per cent of global emissions are generated from the use of regular concrete) and the walls are reversed. Insulated bricks or stonework are on the inside, while the outside might be timber, Colorbond or an Australian product called Weathertex. The dense nature of the floor and walls acts like a sponge, slowly soaking up the sun’s rays, then at night, the heat is given up to the rooms. In summer, the windows are shaded with eaves and blinds, to obstruct the high summer sun, and the floor and walls then become a heat sink, dissipating the warmth. Unlike in many Australian homes, at The Cape, air leaks – often in the walls where builders have left holes around services – are all sealed carefully and checked with special thermal cameras and air-pressure tests. We didn’t want to build mudbrick homes or yurts. We wanted to build mainstream houses.

In a recent analysis of Spano’s home, Damien Moyse, policy and research director at the not-for-profit organisation Renew, estimates that Spano paid $13,465 to boost his home from six stars to 8.3 stars, leading to a maximum annual energy bill of $123. The biggest upfront outlay was the electric Kona, which cost $72,000, compared to $40,000 for the petrol-fuelled model,making for a rather pricey premium of $32,000. Moyse estimates Spano’s energy-efficient house and electric car would save him $5256 a year compared to buying a new six-star house, with no solar or battery, and using a petrol-run Kona. After 15 years, the modelling found that the Spanos would be $21,000 better off. “As early adopters, we are living an experiment and paying a premium, particularly for our electric car,” says Spano. “We are showing the community that breaking our addiction to fossil fuels is possible.” We walk towards the beach, passing by the area where Condon is planning an urban farm that will produce about $140,000 worth of food each year for the residents (50 per cent of the site is open space). To the west, the earth-moving machines are starting on The Cape’s third stage. The existing houses export to the grid four to five times as much energy as they use, making the development operationally carbon-neutral. But will the big developers of mass housing estates take note? So far, the signs are good. Three of Australia’s leading builders and three large land developers have toured the site. Condon believes there will be a big market in retrofitting Australia’s existing energy-guzzling housing stock, but there’s a clear economic choice now about how we build new homes. “We simply can’t keep adding to that poor legacy.” Lyndall Parris, founder of Narara village on the NSW Central Coast, has watched her vision for a better community become reality. "For me, it's so joyful." Credit:James Brickwood Narara

Twenty years ago, when Sydneysider Lyndall Parris turned 50, she delivered a speech to friends and family. Two of her friends’ husbands had died suddenly, leaving them to raise children with little community support. As an accountant, Parris had watched small-business clients work long hours, never seeing their families. Something, Parris thought, was awry in modern life. And, she told her party guests, she was on a mission to change things. Now, having just turned 70, Parris’s vision for a better community is taking shape at Narara, near Gosford on the NSW Central Coast. “For me, it’s so joyful,” she says. When Parris decided to build an eco-village, she set up a website and slowly gathered like-minded people. Then she came across the place: the former Gosford Horticultural Institute research centre, a 68-hectare site bounded on three sides by state and conservation forest. It had a creek, a 45-megalitre dam, office space, plus six large greenhouses. “We really lusted after it,” she recalls. In 2012, the co-operative of members, including builders, retired lawyers and bankers, pitched in $5 million to buy the land from the NSW government. Slowly, the eco-village numbers grew to 170. Stage one’s 60 lots have sold out and a development application is about to be submitted for a similarly numbered second stage. Six households have moved in and another 26 houses are being built, including Parris’s own house of hempcrete (a composite of hemp hurd and lime which acts as a carbon sink). We are showing the community that breaking our addiction to fossil fuels is possible. So far Narara has some cutting-edge, energy-efficient houses, as well as some tried-and-true, more hippie-style varieties such as an earthship, a passive solar structure using discarded tyres packed with earth as building material for outer walls. The eco-village also uses a concept known as sociocracy to make community decisions, based on neither consensus decision-making nor majority rules. Meetings are conducted mostly in “no-response rounds”. Each person has a chance to speak on a proposal, with no responses allowed while they are talking. This process tends to cure a few of the classic issues that create ineffectual meetings, such as interrupters, and the reluctance of natural introverts to contribute. “If I am the fifth speaker, I can relax because I know I will be heard, so I can listen to all the other people speaking before me,” says Parris. “I’m somebody who cuts off people and jumps in and doesn’t give people the time to talk, so it takes the pressure off. Often, I can completely change my thoughts by the time it gets round to me.”

Mother-of-three Vanessa Huang, 32, lives in the village with her husband John (he commutes three days a week to his IT job in Sydney). She loves its environmental aspects and was also drawn here by a desire for community. Huang knew that she wanted to stay home with her children, but there seemed to be no one else around her doing that where they lived in the north-western Sydney suburb of Melrose Park. “You have to have two incomes to afford your house, so you can’t just have your kids at home,” she says. “We found there would be no one in the local park. Everyone would be in day care.” Loading In Narara, the parents band together to take the burden off each other, she says. “Just being around other parents like this makes you more conscious: I feel like I need to be a better parent and not yell as much.” It costs $30,000 to become a member at Narara, which acts like a land deposit. Residents must donate 52 hours’ work a year to help the co-operative, while homes must have an energy-efficiency rating of at least seven stars. House plans must be approved by the building design working group and immediate neighbours. Tony and Teresa Farrell were the first of the village to move in last year. Their home, which looks like a conventional modern house, has phase-change material in the ceiling: pockets of an oil-like substance that solidifies and melts, depending on the temperature. In winter, the oil absorbs the heat and then releases it at night. In summer, it loses its heat overnight and keeps the house cool during the day. Making the house greener accounted for less than 10 per cent of their building budget of just under $440,000, the Farrells estimate, but they are likely to save about $2000 a year. Their quarterly midwinter bill was $20.32, and generally their home generates three times more electricity than the couple uses. “By not using all this energy to heat and cool the home, you are just living more lightly on the planet,” says Teresa.

Tony and Teresa Farrell at the Narara housing community on the NSW Central Coast: they estimate that their greener house will save them $2000 a year. Credit:James Brickwood Mullum Creek It’s a surly winter’s day and siblings Sue, Danny and Steve Mathews are standing around a model of their housing development. Under a clear plastic box, the house lots are marked in white lines, surrounded by little fake trees like dried broccoli stems. We are standing in a classic 1950s house – large windows, shagpile brown carpet – that the trio grew up in at Donvale, east of Melbourne. It’s now a makeshift site office for the Mullum Creek estate, a project to which they’ve committed about $8 million so that the bush around here can be saved from urban creep. The new estate is where Bill Keramidas and his multi-generational family now live in their 7.8-star home. The Mathews family moved to the area in 1958, when Donvale was just orchards, paddocks, market gardens and remnant bushland. “One of my strongest memories is how fabulous the apples were,” says Sue, a petite woman with round glasses and interesting earrings. Steve, in a grey beanie, seems the most affected by his idyllic, nature-bound childhood: “I just loved everything about it: the trees, and their colours and textures, the animals, the lizards, the yabbies, the creek, the blackfish in the creek, the eels, the rocks, the clay.” Over the years, the siblings’ parents, Bob and Rivkah Mathews, ended up with 70 hectares of land, adding neighbouring parcels around Mullum Creek to their original holding to save it from the relentless advance of Melbourne’s urban spread. In 1972, it was rezoned from rural to residential. The Mathews refused to sell to developers – who were likely to leave little remnant bush – but couldn’t sit on it, either, as the land taxes were astronomical. So the siblings decided to give about 45 per cent of the land to the council for a park, and contain housing to small pockets on already-cleared orchard land. And – because their childhood had propelled them all into careers that in some way involved the environment – they set the bar high for houses built there.

On the estate, houses must reach an energy-efficiency rating of 7.5 stars, have at least four kilowatts of rooftop solar, and housing designs must be approved – at three stages – by the family’s design review committee. There are independent inspections of the energy performance by assessors, Floyd Energy, as well as compulsory guidelines on timber use, and general guidelines on the use of steel, clay products and cement. This is to keep the embodied energy – the energy consumed by all the processes in the production of a building – low. The height of buildings and vegetation is also assessed to make sure no one is blocking access to winter sun or solar power. The sustainability criteria are written into the contract of sale and governed by an agreement under state legislation. What the Mathews family didn’t expect was the size of the houses that people wanted to build. Unlike The Cape, the suburb that the siblings were operating in had become quite exclusive and also afflicted with 1980s-style housing excess. Around the Mathews’ land, the most extraordinarily large homes – more correctly palaces – had sprung up on acre blocks. One looks like a celebrity’s home from the Hollywood Hills, with palm trees and forbidding entry gates to a sprawling white compound. These homes are everything the nature-loving Mathews family aren’t: ostentatious and hugely fossil-fuel-dependent. About a decade ago, Steve found a man foraging on their property for firewood. He lived in one of these palaces, but had lost his job and couldn’t pay his latest $800 energy bill. Danny, Sue and Steve Mathews, founders of the Mullum Creek estate. Credit:Meredith O'Shea Large houses contain more embodied greenhouse gases in their construction materials, but also have to work much harder to meet a 7.5 star rating. The Mathews siblings have sold 52 of the 54 blocks in the estate (keeping two in reserve) and many first-stage buildings, such as the Keramidas’ home, are completed or being built. The family reluctantly took action at Victoria’s Civil and Administrative Tribunal after one resident proceeded with works the design review committee felt were inconsistent with guidelines. On rare occasions, when it is too expensive to rectify an accidental and minor breach of the guidelines, residents have been encouraged to make “offset payments” to environmental charities. A few residents have vented their spleens on Facebook, blaming the Mathews family and the committee for problems with meeting guidelines. Most owners follow the rules.