The house that Joost Bakker built
ECO warrior, florist, installation artist, designer… whatever you call Joost Bakker, he’s a man ahead of his time.
THIRTY years ago, if someone had foretold of people walking around the streets plugged into mobile phones, they’d have invited the same sceptical bemusement that dances across my face as I listen to Joost Bakker dream of cities and suburbs where roofs are covered with nutrient-rich soil to support skyline garden plots capable of cultivating vast quantities of food.
He speaks of a world where organic compost units sit snug beside domestic dishwashers. He forages through fields of history marrying ancient traditions with smart technology, fast, urgent, a faint trace of his Dutch mother tongue, his piercing blue eyes bright with the prospect of harvesting change.
We’re sitting beneath sculptural bundles of bare branches that hang upside-down from the ceiling of his laneway cafe, Brothl, days after The New York Times dubbed him “the poster boy for zero waste living”. Inside the small galley kitchen, chef Matt Stone simmers bones discarded by Neil Perry’s Rockpool for stock-based dishes using rainwater captured on the Monbulk property where Bakker lives in the Dandenong Ranges. Every bit of organic leftover at the cafe is fed into an odour-free unit that creates compost to spread on his 2.4ha garden boasting 250 species of plants.
The cutting edge is a precarious place. Weeks later Brothl shut down, partly because of council demands that he accept open-ended liability for the compost unit nestled against an external wall. But Bakker has done what he set out to do. The ideas he unfurled in sustainable Greenhouse restaurants in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne (the last two as “pop-ups”) are catching on. Units converting meat, dairy and any organic waste into compost for enriching soil are multiplying in restaurants at home and around the world, even at Copenhagen’s famous Noma. Toilets harvesting urine are a slower burn but stainless steel kegs replacing bottles of milk and mineral water are creeping into vogue.
“He’s been absolutely instrumental in galvanising restaurants around the world to think about doing things differently,” says Perry. “What he does, what he says, makes so much sense.” The chef’s own culinary empire has purchased hundreds of plastic crates to reduce packaging and his restaurants at Melbourne’s Crown Casino sort organic waste for compost. Now Qantas is coming on board after Perry introduced CEO Alan Joyce to Bakker. Starting with the airline’s Sydney lounges, Bakker will help the company turn recovered plastics into flowerpots and recycle organic waste.
You can’t convince people to do these things. You’ve got to do it yourself, then they will follow.”His practices keep taking hold. McDonald’s has begun ordering milk delivered in kegs after senior US staff visited Bakker’s Greenhouses. Kitchen appliances company Miele flew him to Germany to meet their research and development team and at a recent corporate summit in Milan, compost units were on the agenda. “Whether it happens I don’t know,” Bakker shrugs. “You can’t convince people to do these things. You’ve got to do it yourself, then they will follow.”
Bakker, 42, is a creative disruptor who has designed everything from brilliant art installations to floral wizardry, homewares and, most notably, fire-resistant houses that withstood a CSIRO test in temperatures over 1000ºC.
Sometimes naysayers and doubters win. His breathtaking plan for a sustainable rooftop farm with windmill, glasshouses, stone mill and bakery plus restaurant on top of the original National Australia Bank building in Collins Street, Melbourne, could not clear the city council. “It’s not pie-in-the-sky stuff,” he insists. “I really hope and dream that the houses of the future will have green roofs so that in 20 to 30 or 40 years’ time you will fly into Melbourne and you’ll see this green mass of trees and vegetation and bee hives and birds.” He’ll happily turn the first sod.
Everybody said to me, ‘You can’t put a garden on the house.’ I knew I could.”Walking down the driveway towards a rectangular house that wears a flat roof of lawn greener than the surrounding bush, I almost expect Kevin McCloud to emerge from the set of Grand Designs, but Joost (pronounced “Yoast”) Bakker’s tall figure bounds forward in T-shirt and jeans to guide me through. The Australian version of this architectural reality show is filming the rise of his straw-bale house at Kinglake, but the cameras are absent this late summer’s day. Mobile solar panels power the construction using materials that are non-toxic, recyclable or recycled, such as the retired shipping container incorporated into the interior. A plywood floor is laid with glue made from soya beans; the flooring has a “bio-mimicry” design inspired by oysters clinging to rock.
This is the third version of a house he first conceived in 2007 for his family at Monbulk, where he lives with his wife Jennie and their three daughters, Ruby, 11, Charlie, nine, and Remy, six. He wanted to put a garden on their roof. “But I didn’t have the confidence. Everybody said to me, ‘You can’t put a garden on the house.’ I knew I could and after I finished the house I swore I would never make that mistake again.” So he cloaked the exterior walls in steel mesh hung with terracotta pots filled with strawberry plants bearing fruit in a lush advance on his pioneering Rio columns for vertical indoor greenery.
Persisting with his vision, he added a roof garden to the first Greenhouse at Melbourne’s Federation Square in 2008. This arresting touch became his trademark, crowning each subsequent Greenhouse as well as his second straw-bale house in the spa town of Daylesford. Owner Mitch Watson, co-founder of Daylesford & Hepburn Mineral Springs, says the sight of grasses, flax and wild fennel sprouting on top lures curious passersby. Watson met Bakker at a hospitality expo. At Bakker’s behest he now bulk delivers mineral water to restaurants in kegs rather than plastic. The mesh wrap around Watson’s house is filled with crushed, recycled bricks, an effect so striking that Jennie convinced him to redo the walls of their own home with the same finish.
But the masterstroke of Bakker’s design offers inhabitants in a bushfire zone protection from the ferocity of a Black Saturday fireball. Most houses have hollow roof cavities lined with wooden beams, providing oxygen and fuel for a fire; by using a lightweight steel frame instead of timber, straw bales, fireproof windows, 60 tonnes of soil on the roof and the addition of magnesium oxide cladding, Bakker’s prototype withstood immersion in the extreme heat of a simulated bushfire front.
Justin Leonard, the head of CSIRO’s Bushfire Urban Design team, conducted the test at a special purpose site on the NSW south coast. Infected by Bakker’s contagious, “gutsy” quest, Leonard suggested the magnesium oxide boards, which Bakker tracked down in China, since they were not then certified for sale in Australia. The house beat nature’s worst magnificently. “We gave each other a big hug when it was over,” says Bakker. A few bales were singed and rubber door seals melted, but otherwise Leonard declares: “It passed with flying colours.” With the outside subjected to 1000ºC fire conditions, the indoor temperature peaked at 31ºC without a trace of the harmful gases released in houses where there is paint, plastics and other toxic material.
Bakker does not want to become a commercial builder, just as he has no desire to run restaurants full time. Motivated by the thrill of good ideas catching on, he is considering online access to the finer details of his blueprint.
“I get a lot of inquiries about design aspects of houses,” Leonard says, “but in my career very few people turn up with a desire to put together a complete package that solves all the problems in an integrated way. Joost is inspirational. He is a much more complex person than a house designer. The way he runs restaurants; the way he deals with food chains and how he prepares food, eliminating packaging and landfill out of his business. He’s changed my professional outlook on sustainability and influenced me on a personal level.” How? “I roll my own oats,” Leonard laughs.
The Schnitzer roller is a Bakker specialty that goes to the heart of his magpie mind, plucking ideas from obscure sources, finding treasures by the wayside. As a florist, Bakker prefers the crooked wild foliage beside train lines to nursery clipped perfection; even as a boy in Holland he would bring home bits of china or metal he’d dug from the soil. He stumbled across Dr Johann Georg Schnitzer in a second-hand bookstore. “It was the best $5 I ever spent,” he jokes. Schnitzer is a German dentist who in the 1950s became puzzled by the rise of tooth decay in the region where he practised, except for the one town with a bakery still grinding wheat. “Grain contains Omega 3 and oils that are good for us but when they introduced steel mills the heat burnt off the oils,” says Bakker. “This meant the flour did not become rancid and could be produced in mass quantities, but in the process we lost the good enzymes and oils.”
When Bakker proposed grinding wheat for his inaugural Greenhouse, his business partner baulked. “I remember him saying, ‘There’s no bloody way we’re grinding wheat.’ Back then nobody was doing it. Go back a hundred years and that’s the only way they were doing it. So we did it and people loved it and now bakeries all over Australia are doing it. If the government just went and bought everyone a roller and a bag of oats they could close half the hospitals. I truly believe this would solve a lot of problems, from depression to allergies.”
Is he crazy? “It’s not just the oats, or the wheat, it’s the soil,” he says. This son of a bulb farmer is a soil fanatic. When he visits farms or gardens he can’t resist scooping a handful of earth to smell. The staff at Brothl wore T-shirts insisting: “It’s all about the soil.”
We’re standing in his Monbulk kitchen beside two small rollers clamped to a bench. He pours wheat grains into a dish to show me the fine dust left behind. “That’s soil,” he says. “Processed grain is washed or steamed. We don’t fully understand what the billions of microbes, bacteria, mycelium and many other organisms in soil do, but I have a gut feeling that the soil on the seed has a positive impact on mental health.” He acknowledges there’s no science to prove his theory but the family’s chooks know the difference between lettuces grown in soil and the hydroponic variety. Offered both, they always prefer the former.
“It’s quite addictive,” he says of the freshly rolled oats. “I take mine with me when I travel.” The customs official at Heathrow airport held up a lengthening queue of fidgety travellers while he watched Bakker clamp a roller to the table for a demonstration. “He told me he was going to get one,” Bakker insists.
He is truly ahead of the curve but being ahead of the curve can sometimes be as bad as being behind the curve.”Waiting impatiently behind him was investor and entrepreneur Greg Hargrave, whose plan for a brand based around Bakker foundered in the wake of the global financial crisis. “Ideas and visions mean more to Joost than lucrative rewards. That is the nature of highly creative talents,” Hargrave says. The “Rio column” Bakker designed 15 years ago to stack plants was overtaken by cheaper copies. “He is truly ahead of the curve but being ahead of the curve can sometimes be as bad as being behind the curve. The important thing to understand about Joost is he’s in it for the change, not the money. He inspires a lot of people.”
Hargrave owns a Schnitzer roller, and an early Bakker installation – a huge wire sphere strung with hundreds of lightbulbs – graces his property on the Mornington Peninsula. Bakker’s installations are beautiful flights of fancy often combining flowers and foliage, such as the seven-metre-high chandelier of wine glasses soldered together, each vessel cradling pink peony roses, that he made for a Lexus launch in 2006. His floristry led to grander commissions for corporate clients who favoured his distinctive muscular style, exposing roots and bulbs interwoven with wire and branches. Early patrons included chef Shannon Bennett of Vue de Monde, and Bruce Keebaugh of catering and event management company The Big Group.
“What do you call him? A florist, an installation artist, a sustainability warrior, he’s created so many wonderful things and that’s part of the problem,” says Keebaugh, who wants Joost involved in designing the Australian pavilion for the 2020 World Expo because of the originality he brings to his crafts. “If there is a criticism, he needs a good management team around him. Like a lot of creative people he is not bound by budgets or standards and procedures.”
Bakker is the first to admit he’s burdened by an abundance of what his friends and disciples refer to affectionately as “brain dumps”, which is why he’s so difficult to corral. Paul O’Brien of Red Rock Leisure struggles to define this searching character who crosses so many disciplines. “I think he’s a little bit of a prophet, a polymath. I’m fascinated by his problem-solving mind. He’s a once-off. One out of the bag.”
Jennie Bakker is stumped by how to label her husband. “It takes a good minute to describe what he does. I would say he’s a florist, but he’s also a designer, an artist, with amazing food philosophies. You can’t put him in a box.”
Converts to his causes help him outfox the straighteners and regulators. “I’ve got a million ideas but I’m not good at executing them,” he acknowledges. His left hand is often scrawled with marker pen dot points.
Debra Dawson of the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority swooped in to claim Bakker’s proposal for a Sydney Greenhouse. She made it happen within her precinct at Circular Quay, hoping local retailers and restaurants would seize his approach to eliminating waste and refuse. Miele contributed $60,000 to this venture but mostly Bakker digs into his own savings to fund his projects. Built from recycled or recyclable materials, each Greenhouse aims to deliver from farm or field to table then back into the earth with the smallest possible footprint. “It was an amazing success story,” Dawson says. “Packed out.”
But the compost machine that Bakker installed at the front door to excite interest did not leap the fence. “We had 1000 people through a day and I thought, here I was in Circular Quay, surrounded by restaurants… everybody will start putting in these machines. Two years later, not one.” Bakker persisted: he opened Silo in Melbourne’s Hardware Lane, the precursor to Brothl, installing a unit that over three years has converted 150 tonnes of organic waste into 15 tonnes of compost. “It just went crazy,” he says. “Within a year, some of the best restaurants in the world had come on board.” From little things, big things grow. Famous chefs including René Redzepi from Noma in Copenhagen and Alex Atala from D.O.M. in São Paulo followed in his footsteps and units are mushrooming gradually in other corners of the hospitality industry.
Swept away by Bakker’s bravado, Dawson embraced his vision for a hanging garden of gourds, cucumbers and tomatoes across Sydney’s Pyrmont Bridge. The project, dubbed Amaze, aimed to recycle organic waste generated by Darling Harbour restaurants to create a green, productive walkway that could feed, shade and attract pedestrian traffic. But authorities bowed to noisy opposition from cyclists and broadcaster Alan Jones. Weeks before construction was scheduled to begin, the plan was shelved.
Invitations to take his Greenhouses to Milan, London and Copenhagen were stillborn for lack of funds. Disappointment is an occupational hazard. A steel mesh model for the Amaze project stands in the grounds of his Monbulk home with a basketball hoop attached for his daughters. He felt broken when Melbourne City Council enforced height limitations to veto his rooftop garden. “The whole idea of rooftop farming is that we use modern technology – intensive hydroponic systems – but we do it with nutrient-rich soil. I really believe our industrial buildings in the city can grow most of our food.” His ambition for the Collins Street roof was to demonstrate that serious quantities of food could be grown in a couple of thousand square metres. “In one square metre you can produce 80kg of tomatoes, 140kg of cucumbers, 40kg of potatoes. Multiply that by 1000,” he says.
He’s a pace-setter, an innovator who is always pushing boundaries and creating momentum.”Tony Arnel, global director of sustainability at engineering firm Norman Disney & Young, served as Victoria’s building commissioner when the first Greenhouse went up in Federation Square. “We were able to see a way to give him a permit. He’s a pace-setter, an innovator who is always pushing boundaries and creating momentum,” Arnel says. He believes the roof gardens will materialise. “Around the world there is a lot more interest in growing food locally on small plots of land in urban areas.”
Frustration steels Bakker’s spirit. His heroes are disruptors and dot-connectors emboldened by intuitive reasoning. “None of my ideas are new,” he says. “I’m an observer. I love watching how things happen and how things are done. I think about everything. I like linking one idea to another.” His experiment with chipped bricks around the bale houses took shape after he felt the coolness of a gravel drive. “When I put my hand on a solid mass of concrete it was boiling hot but the gravel was cool. The rocks are loose so they don’t generate so much heat.”
He credits Austrian architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser as the true pioneer of green rooftops in the 1970s. Bakker’s idea for vegetables and intensive farm plots is a refinement that answers world concerns about food production. “This idea has been in my head since I was 12 years old. Why are we cutting down forests because we need more food? We’ve got all these roofs, tonnes of grey water, we’re using energy to cool houses in summer, we’ve got everything we need. We just need to redesign the houses.”
Note to parents: Bakker did not finish school or complete any formal training whatsoever.
An early home video shows baby Joost sitting between rows of strawberry bushes, his mouth crammed with red fruit. From the moment he could walk he would accompany his bulb farmer father, Joop, digging potatoes in their garden, always on the hunt for old coins or shards of pottery to pocket. “My dad always said to me, ‘Never walk with empty hands’.” The refrain is embedded in his soul. “He was a passionate, bloody hard-working man who loved everything about the natural world.” An innovator, Joop was the first to grow lilies commercially in their hometown of Obdam, 50km from Amsterdam, and was hungry for new nursery technology.
If Joost inherited these traits from his father, who died in 2012, then his mother Lia takes credit for kindling the creative yearnings of a boy who could never sit still. She arranged weekly lessons for him with a local painter, Jan Hollenberg. “Jan had a big influence on me,” Bakker says. “He taught me to look at the light bouncing off a roof or the shape of wind-pruned tree. I learnt to look at landscape in a different way.”
The family migrated to Australia in 1982, when Joost was nine, settling in Monbulk where large numbers of Dutch migrants were employed by Tesselaar’s bulb nursery. He remembers seeing the rich red volcanic soil of this region for the first time. “It was so different from the clay soils around Holland. We all had to touch it; my dad did too.” Local headmaster Ray Yates, who retired last year, vividly recalls the blond-haired boy arriving in October without a word of English and speaking fluently by Christmas.
He’d been taught recycling at school in Holland and his family, including four older stepbrothers, often debated problems of pollution preoccupying this small European nation. “For us it was a way of life keeping nature the way it should be,” Lia says. She often took Joost with her on expeditions rummaging through second-hand shops. “He would always clog up our shed with stuff.” Bakker remembers this bone of contention as his bedroom overflowed into the garage and beyond. “I can’t throw anything away,” he confesses. His wife Jennie now suffers piles of pots, mesh, crates, tubs, rusted drums, rolls of mesh, even a kitchen sink, along a boundary fence. “I just don’t look,” she laughs.
At 16 he remembers skips full of rubbish during his parents’ home renovation compared with the clean efficiency of a 2ha glasshouse erected on the farm. “It really got me thinking. I was already going to recycling yards and thinking, ‘Why isn’t this material being used?’ ”
I was already going to recycling yards and thinking, ‘Why isn’t this material being used?’ ”When he left school in Year 11 his mother felt anxious but his father kept faith in their son’s zest for work. Rather than buy into the family bulb farm he began exporting flowers from a South Melbourne warehouse he shared with a mushroom importer as his floristry evolved from bouquets to bolder displays. “I was at that point in my life where I either did what I love or a business with all the headaches. Every time I was asked to do something creative I got so much pleasure and from that moment on I followed my heart.”
He still rises several days a week at 4am to supply corporate clients with arrangements of foliage and blooms picked from the acres of plants surrounding his home. Buckets of ginger leaf and smoke bush stand ready at the door of a cavernous garage stuffed to the ceiling with tools and remnants that might come in handy. The flowers and the art subsidise his restless quest to change behaviour. “We’ve spent a lot of money over the years making my ideas come true,” he says, reckoning he’s invested around $500,000 in technology not yet discounted by mass demand.
Rob Pascoe, whose company Closed Loop sells compost units, says Bakker is a leader in the field. “He realises we need to change the way we live but he’s not gloom and doom about it. He’s a crusader who believes we can all do it. We will do it. And I’ll demonstrate it. Plenty of people have ideas but very few turn them into reality. Most will stop at the first hurdle. Joost won’t stop at a 10m-high brick wall,” he says. He thanks Bakker for getting compost units into five of the world’s best restaurants: “It’s gone global.”
Bakker and chef Matt Stone will take the Greenhouse pop-up restaurant model to Istanbul in September as part of a cultural collaboration marking the Gallipoli centenary. Bakker has also bought an old petrol station site in Kallista, not far from his home, where he envisages building three townhouses with productive gardens on top plus the urine harvesting system he piloted at one of the Greenhouse pop-ups. Urine and bones are rich in phosphorous. Bakker loathes synthetic fertiliser almost as much as waste. These are his crusades.
He happily lathers himself in rich red volcanic earth for a photograph holding one of the chooks that survived a recent midnight raid from a local fox. Around us are goats, beehives, lavender, artichokes, bird of paradise plants, large leaf oak, row upon row of herbs, flowers and gums in a bountiful garden where we sit sharing coffee and “stroopwafels”, a sweet Dutch treat that, wouldn’t you know it, are made from recycled biscuits, invented by a baker from Gouda, who in 1810 or so experimented with a batch of leftover crumbs. As I polish off mine, I wonder whether history will anoint this Pied Piper florist from Monbulk with a footnote all of his own.
Photography Earl Carter, Julian Kingma
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