S2 E2 - Designing a home for the future with Freadman White Architects

In this episode of "Inside Melbourne's Property Market," host Andrew McCann is joined by Alana Freadman and Michael White from Freadman White Architects to discuss the future of home design and architecture. They explore how evolving human needs are shaping the spaces we live in, with a focus on flexibility, adaptability, and sustainability. 

Alana and Michael share insights from their practice, highlighting trends in work-from-home setups, health and wellbeing considerations, and the impact of construction costs on design decisions. They also discuss innovative approaches to sustainable building, including the use of passive design and adaptive reuse of existing structures. 

Tune in to hear expert perspectives on creating homes that are both functional and reflective of contemporary living needs.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to another episode of Inside Melbourne's Property Market. Brought to you by Jellis Craig. I'm your host, Andrew McCann. In this episode, I'm joined by leading architects Alana Freadman and Michael White from Melbourne based architecture and interiors firm, Freadman White Architects. We're here to discuss the future of our homes, the spaces that we reside in, and how humanity's evolving and what that means in terms of design and architecture and the way that we're designing homes for the future. Great to have you both. Thanks so much for being here with us today. It's always exciting to be talking to people in that architecture and design space, and we'd love to hear from you a bit more about your practice and certainly how you're seeing the environment in the world that you're working at the moment. Appreciate it. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us, Andrew, and thanks to Jellis Craig. Yeah, I think it's an important time for us to be part of these conversations today and get into the kind of meat of what we're experiencing as a practice. So a bit about ourselves. We're a small team by design, but that doesn't mean we are not punching above our weight in terms of the complexity and the size of projects we're doing, but it's holistically residential work currently within the state of Victoria with some projects in other states, but mainly focusing around here. We've seen some really interesting work from you in the multi-residential space and also the general residential. Would that be fair to say that you work in both of those stream? Yeah. That's right. So very residential focus, but from all scales, from small additions, more substantial alterations and additions, new dwellings, townhouse models and small boutique apartments and some of the larger scale apartments as well. So all resi. So you get to see the full gamut, which is terrific. And that's exactly what we see too at Gilis Craig. So it's really interesting to get your perspective from the starting point. We often sell the completed product or the concept, but it's great to understand more from you around how you are approaching brief to work. So just talk us through that sort of flexibility and adaptability that people are looking for in their homes these days. How do you approach those briefs and have the way that people want to live in their homes changed dramatically in what you've seen over the past three to five years? Certainly coming out of Covid, it might be something that we've experienced. That one of our first projects was our own and we, in order to get a foot in the market, we needed to think laterally. We set to design the home to have real flexibility at the ground level. We ran our small home office from the ground up spec the finishes on what would otherwise be quite a vanilla spec garage to something a bit more elevated in detail. It could be used as a rumpus when we've now got two children. We have moved on since those days, but they were able to utilize that space. The first floor of that house was also designed to be adaptable over consolidating and compressing spaces through lightweight structural changes. And we had a friend sublet from that townhouse whilst we were living in the upper floors. And it was a very ambitious project, a lot of learnings and a lot of mistakes made, and we've able to, I guess live that experience and carry it forward with clients now who are thinking about post pandemic work from home health and wellbeing, multi-gen living. Having the ability to kind of fold some of that experience of these new functional briefs is I think a good thing for us. And one of the things that we do see is that the home is such an important place for people, families safety, the way that you feel about walking through the door at the end of a workday. What are the main things that you're seeing in terms of trend and consideration now is work from home? One of them is that health and wellbeing. Yeah, definitely. Definitely work from home and health and wellbeing, particularly after covid naturally and as we mentioned before, across the scales as well. So whether it's apartment living, we're definitely making sure that there's a space to study and also a space that is separated from the main living area so you can really feel as though you are shifting from your everyday life into a workspace as opposed to feeling like you're still within the family home, which I think is really important to everyone and learnings from covid. But moving forward, people are having that flexibility and working from home a lot more, which means that they need a space where they can focus on the tasks for the day and then separate that from home and life more generally. And I think within that as well aspect is really important. Again, from single dwellings to multi-residential to make sure that there's nature to look onto and greenery, which is part of that wellbeing aspect from where we are working from home. And our daily activities need to be surrounded by nature for focus and maintain. Yeah, we're finding that there's not just one work from home space, that there's multiple now, whether that's within the kind of passive surveillance space around the kitchen to monitor what teenagers are working on. We're having more informal workspaces off to the side or tucked away behind sliding screens. There's home offices for mom and dad that have that aspect line of speaking to, and then there's additional ones in the kind of sleeping quarters of the homes as well. So it's sort of thinking about the blurred lines between getting that kind of balance of lifestyle to a busy work life as well to the home design. So I think one of the interesting and more challenging areas that we are all hearing about at the moment is the cost of construction. And I'm sure that's a deterrent and a challenge for you. But with that comes the importance of understanding the other aspects of sustainability and how to build appropriately. Also taking into consideration the cost of running a home and energy costs. How are you approaching that and trends are you seeing in that space at the moment? Yeah, so there's clearly market pressures and the ongoing cost of living is the pressure we're all feeling from our day-to-day living and certainly within architecture and construction of the built environment, we're seeing a multifaceted approach. In our work and design, we're trained to consider that the design is the solution to challenges. And so some of the things that we try and apply practically is beginning with some passive design of the home or the apartment where we exploit the orientation of the site for natural ventilation and natural light. We are then thinking about thermal performance. So we lean into mason reconstruction typically because of its and concrete, because of its low maintenance, ongoing low maintenance of costs, and that it can harness heat within the cooler months to let that heat the home through the day. And then some of the planting we'll speak to later on. So working really in depth with landscape architects to think about the heat island effects of our built environment where the more we construct, the more the heat in the warmer months of the year become a problem. So to mitigate where we're thinking of ways to have a good impact on the planet to reduce our carbon footprint and deal with some of those cost pressures at the same time. And Alana, in terms of the construction elements, have there been some examples where you can talk about where sustainability or even just smart design has helped to be more practical in the way that you've gone about construction costs and mitigating some of that risk for customers? Yeah, definitely. I mean, every budget needs to be utilized to its nth degree and making sure that we use the budget as best as we can. There was a project a little while ago in Elwick, which is an alterations in addition to an existing home. And when we visited the site, there was an existing lien to it, the rear of the property, which is quite traditional. I find a lot of those around Melbourne. And the clients briefed us to demolish the addition and to do a new living dining area at the rear of the property. When Michael and I had a look at it, we realized that there was elements to that lean to that we could actually utilize, for example, the slab and there were masonry walls around that addition. The ceiling was very low though, and wasn't commensurate with the quality of home that we were seeking to achieve. So we demolished the roof but kept the remaining walls and slab of that existing structure and just elevated the roof to have a large tall ceiling and built upon those existing walls. So we built, sorry, we probably retained 70% of that existing structure, which really reduces the cost of the addition. And also to your point earlier, is a sustainable approach because that material was retained rather than being demolished and having to bring in new concrete and masonry to achieve. And some of those learnings we're now taking forward to new commercial work. So working with a innovative developer in the berley maltings to retain the silos to adaptive reuse, those have apartments within and also around the perimeter of the low warehouse. So there's a high retention of heritage fabric there, which is fantastic from an urban design perspective and retaining our past history, but also reducing our costs of the construction and waste on materials. Amazing. One of the other areas that I think we're always interested in, and you've touched on a little bit is both the nature and the wellness side of things. I think, again, we talk about our experiences in the sale of property maybe five, 10 years ago you used to see a lot of home theaters, you'd see a lot of basement carriages. I think that's probably something we're not seeing as much of the wine cellar. We hear more about the yoga studio or the home office or the energy efficiency and the pride that people take in those considerations. How are you working with that nature and wellness, I suppose, trend and customer expectation? How does that come into your practice? Yeah, I think at the different scales and programs of our residential work, it's coming in on all those levels. So from the alterations of a heritage home, we're looking at ways in which a swimming pool doesn't become the large amenity at the rear of the garden, but how can it become a reflective amenity as well? That kind of gives all year round. We're not fortunate like some of our northern east and seaboard states like Queensland and New South Wales to be able to swim all year round. So one client, it was a nice narrative that was emerging of his upbringing in Queensland and how the swimming pool can actually be the heart of the home. And in the cooler months, it is actually a space that is something to look onto rather than be swimming within and far more of a sculptural piece. So already on the entry sequence of the home, there's this a kind of modulation and decompression of the busy day, leave that at the front door and start to kind of embrace and immerse yourself within the landscape and this swimming pool, not to mention its benefits in the warmer months of Melbourne that it gets used and enjoyed. And then in apartment projects as well for owner occupiers, which we're doing far more work on now where we're moving from probably freestanding homes mentality to living in a more intensified urban fabric of how we can maintain a reflective space. So something that's happening in a leafy eastern suburb at the moment we're designing is a large reflective garden that is more a space of contemplation, which has wellbeing spaces that face onto this garden as it's quite sublime really. It sort of turns its back to a busy main road and those residents will enjoy that kind of space, not to mention what they're also enjoying within the apartment itself. It's sort of thinking about it from a communal use expectation for apartments. And I think one of maybe the bigger topics is, especially that we see is people's confidence to move construction attitude. Is our house right for innovation or do we look for the next one? Just love your insights into what do you think the customers should be most considering before they engage in talking to an architect or about that design aspect? Where do you think that your customers should mindset? I think that that's what we're here for, that they don't necessarily have to hold all the answers. We are the experts in the field in terms of what we can offer them. So they need to have the problems about what they would like to see out of their home or apartment or their new dwelling in terms of what their ideal outcome in terms of their livability location and how they see their life evolving over the next five to 10 years. And I feel like we can provide them that guidance in terms of what the expected construction costs are at the moment and how we might be able to meet their brief within that construction costs. Because clients may, they don't necessarily have the insights that the architect has in relation to overlapping of programs and how you might use spaces for more than one use and how we might not need the rumpus room and the study and the TV room, how those spaces might be able to be combined through modular furniture or joinery or moving walls or screens. And so therefore their brief isn't actually a 200 square meter home, maybe it's only 120 square meters home and it can meet all their requirements beautifully and they can live in a sanctuary that they really love to come home to and within their budgetary constraints, it's really just needs to be the starting conversation of how we can help them achieve their goals. It'd be great also just to get your insights into that leaning of what's the future of design, what are we seeing in terms of the future proofing of your industry and what's changing and how can you give us some insights into what to expect there? Yeah. I mean I think our values as a practice is to think about resilience and resilience against those headwinds, whether they be monetary market pressures, climate change patterns, the future of what education is for our children and how we can best design the spaces to support those changes. We touched on the way that sustainability is probably a connected thread through those themes I just mentioned that how do we ensure that we're providing spaces that are resilient enough to withstand those changes of sustainability? And I think that the future of design is going to be a manifestation of those themes. We find that aesthetically that can be a beautiful outcome as well, and something that connects to the soul and the heart of humankind, because without that, I think it can also be quite boring as well. We love to get into design in a way that is both aesthetically but practically functional. Yeah, I think unfortunately our challenges that we see today are not going away, and they're probably going to get harder as we move forward. So we really have to use our expertise to be creative and find the best solutions for those problems as we move forward. And I think those solutions combined with fantastic clients that allow us to use our creativity will be around adaptive use of spaces for multiple purposes, including multigenerational use because the cost of living is not going away. So it really has to be thoughtful in terms of how we best use our spaces over time for all those reasons that we've spoken to. I. Think for us, I mean obviously at Jellis Craig, we love property and we love houses, but more than anything, we love great design and thoughtful design, and we love the work that you are doing in the footprints that we operate. So today's been an incredibly insightful and an enjoyable conversation. I want to thank you both, Alana and Michael for being with us and for your contribution and wish you the best for the rest of the year and for your ongoing success. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Thanks. Andy. Thanks for having. Us. Thanks for your time. And that's a wrap on today's podcast and our latest episode of Inside Melbourne's Property Market. If you have any questions or topics you'd like us to cover in future episodes, feel free to reach out to us@Jelliscraig.com au. You can also read more about this topic in the report, which you can access via our website. You can download a full transcript of this conversation in the show notes. And otherwise, thank you for joining us today, and until next time, take care and keep exploring the exciting landscape of Melbourne's property market.