Welcome to the Jungle House, the holistically sustainable home of CplusC Architectural Workshop’s director Clinton Cole, partner Hanne and their three children.
This revolutionary three-storey home in Redfern is built within a rejuvenated heritage façade of a long unoccupied two-storey shop-top house.
Sitting on just a 98sqm corner site, with north, east and west solar access and outlook, the interiors – a collaboration between CplusC and designer Jason Sullivan – was a a successful experiment to see how a house on a small site could adopt as many sustainable principles and practices as possible without surrendering the luxuries of an architecturally designed home.
Cole hopes his home – affectionately named Welcome To The Jungle House – can serve as an example of a properly designed and built home where landscape, food, nature, garden, environment, energy, waste, water and architectural aesthetic exist symbiotically.
What was the vision for the home? We bought the site with a vision of creating a home that would fulfil our family’s lifestyle, ethical and emotional needs and educate the public on how sustainable design and building practices can be adopted, no matter how small the home may be.
The home needed to be flexible enough for our growing family and sustainable without having to sacrifice the creature comforts that good architecture typically enjoys.
The centrally located stair allows the first-floor circulation to be kept to a bare minimum with three bedrooms, a bathroom, toilet and laundry all accessible from only a few metres of hallway.
What feature of the home makes you the most proud? It’s is built to last. The steel structure requires less maintenance and will long outlive the alternative timber structural elements.
With careful orientation, the building intelligently reacts to the micro-climate of the location, heating the spaces with passive solar heating and thermal mass when needed, and cooling with transpiration-cooled predominant breezes when needed. Provisions have also been made for electric car charging.
The rooftop garden and beehive provide abundant food for our family and we share anything leftover with friends and neighbours.
Where is the best spot to enjoy your home? The upper floor living spaces. We compressed the lower two levels of the home which allowed an open plan upper floor level space which peeks out above the existing masonry parapet.
Dappled sunlight pours through the nearby tree canopies throughout the day, with warm, ever-changing shadow play on the timber flooring, reflecting and refracting light and rainbows on the ceiling through the array of glass louvres.
An expansive aperture captures the rustling of gum trees and cool winds gliding above the prevailing roofline of the surrounding blocks, pulled in by the fully operable glass inner skin.
What is the most unique feature of your home? Having the solar panels on the façade frees up roof space (vitally important on such a small site) for the rooftop garden.
There’s also a 1600 litre aquaponics fishpond inhabited by edible silver perch (fish).
The pond is linked via a cyclical system to the accessible rooftop where planter beds provide native Australian plants and fruit and vegetables with nutrient enriched water.
Tell us about some of your favourite interiors and key pieces of furniture. Many pieces are from the 1960s — such as our leather lounges. They really make the spaces.
Where do you like to shop for interior pieces? Anywhere from contemporary designer outlets to online craft sites like Etsy where we purchased many of our handles and small feature elements .
What is your favourite spot in your home? The rooftop garden. A fold down ladder at the outdoor living area provides access to a roof garden for growing our fruit and vegetables, composting food scraps and producing worms for the garden and to feed the fish.
The roof is shared with a perimeter of native Australian plants and desert grasses which filter stormwater for the aquaponics pond and acts as the green top hat of the dwelling, whilst enjoying a spectacular view of the iconic Sydney city skyline.
How have you used art in your home? We have pieces by Hugh Holland, Murray Fredericks, Brett Mcdanel, Adam Norton, James Powditch, Tim Silver & Simon Degroot. They are all favourites. I am also an avid Murano glass collector.
What would you change about your home, if anything? I would change the electric in-floor heating to hydronic heating as the electric system is far too energy hungry so we rarely use it.
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