Warren McLaren

Little has changed in the century since Dorothea Mackellar composed her ode to a sunburnt country, describing Australia as a land ‘of droughts and flooding rains’.

A house may be defined by its four walls, but it only becomes a home by what they contain. We see what 14 green-leaning Australian designers feel should occupy the insides of our abodes.

Given the wealth of green content that BPN has served up, Warren McLaren writes, especially since formally incorporating Environ into its editorial mix way back in 2002, readers might be forgiven for assuming that green building design was all pervasive, and dominated the architectural scene.

Unfortunately the undeveloped greenfield site or the knock-down-rebuilt, is not where environmental nirvana is to be found. Rather, Warren McLaren writes, the path to a more sustainably responsible future lurks quietly in our commercial building stock.

Most of the talk (and action) of green design and eco architecture is premised on having a clean slate, a blank canvas, on which to conjure up more award winning, high star rating, icons of sustainable creativity. Yet the vast bulk of our buildings are already with us. Seven out of eight million Australian households live in existing separate houses and/or terrace/town houses. This is where the biggest bang for buck resides, if we really want to affect environmentally positive change. We need to swivel our focus onto our rather copious stock of energy inefficient brick veneer (and similar) homes. And eco retrofit them. Warren McLaren lists some "bolt-on" that require little or no renovation to an established dwelling, but will appreciably reduce the building's environmental impact and save on running costs.

Warren McLaren reports on the new wave of housing in Australia which aims to not contribute to climate change.