As home owners seek features and aspects to set them apart from others, some are zeroing in on lifts. At the high end of the residential market, the trend of customising lifts has grown in popularity over the past couple of years.
“People are more attuned to design and style these days and [want to have their] lifts consistent with other décor in the home. But I think they are often looking for a wow factor as well,” says Andrew Borg, general manager at Homelift Elevators. “Basically, people would prefer to have a lift that looked and acted like part of their home, as opposed to something which is store bought or out of the box.”
According to Colin Stannard, director at Southern Lifts, the growth in custom lifts has come about due to people becoming more aware of the options available to them. “For example, you’d be told, ‘The lift doors are metal’ and that’s the way it is. Now it’s more, ‘Here’s your lift — what finishes do you want?’ Now you can even paint the doors if you want,” he says.
One of the most common features of customised lifts is putting the same doors as the rest of the home on the front of the lift. This can give a seamless appearance and make the lift appear as though it was just another room in the house. “A lot of people are using timber. They’re using feature doors and they are able to finish the walls right up to the lift door,” Stannard says. Tiles and carpeting in the lift can even be made to match the rest of the house. The level of detail can go as far as labelling each floor inside the lift as ‘bedroom level’, instead of the standard ‘level one’.
The trend of customising lifts is being partially driven by architects. Howard Tanner, director at Tanner Architects, has been involved with a small number of homes which have included lifts. He says if he is involved with a project with a lift, he will make it blend with the rest of the home. “The ordinary product is not something which you would want to put in your home, and it’s probably not something that you want to put in a smart office. If you’ve got a house with fine timber floors, you'd obviously want to continue the timber and related finishes into the lift,” he says.
Customising lifts is not only a trend in the residential sector, and it is not only done for aesthetic reasons. A project Homelift Elevators has been involved with included a synagogue in the Northern suburbs of Sydney. It had to design a lift which would automatically go up and down on Sabbath and Jewish holy days. “In Jewish religion you can’t cause a machine to work over the Sabbath, so we had to program the machine so on sunset on a Friday, it would switch to automatic. It would go up for two minutes, automatically close its doors and come back down, wait for two minutes, close its doors and go back up,” Borg says.
The trend for customised lifts does not appear to be a fad. At Aussie Lifts, each lift is custom made, depending on any special needs of the user, travel distance, shaft size and even door hinges. Toni Gregory, sales and design consultant at Aussie Lifts, says it also offers cosmetic options for doors, door interlocks, lift car fitout and lexan inserts. “Our style of decor ranges from white Colorbond to a more traditional style of Tasmanian Oak or custom wood. Every person has their own style and we work with them to provide a lift that complements their décor," Gregory says. Aussie Lifts also manufactures lifts which have swing doors, instead of sliding doors.
Borg expects the level of customised work to increase. He says around 80 per cent of Homelift Elevators’ work is purpose-built, with that figure to rise by 30 per cent to 40 per cent over the coming years. “The market has been growing steadily for the past 10 years,” he says. “In new housing estates, the land block size is shrinking and if people really want to have a home of size, they literally have to go up. Two- and three-level homes are almost the norm these days. As long as that continues to be the norm, then I think you’ll find lots and lots more of these houses having lifts in there.”
