PurePassiv

This is home for a family with three small children who also regularly welcome overseas family for extended stays. There’s room for rest, work and play here, along with a beautiful connection to their fruitful gardens and adjoining bush. 

Their food gardens and fruit trees shelter the house from the street and make the most of the north-facing front garden. A green roof cloaks the garage and provides a peaceful, glare-free outlook from the top story. There’s also a beehive and rainwater is harvested.

The Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park is just a few hundred metres away. While it offers welcome space for recreation, it’s not always a benign environment. The ventilation system which ensures fresh air everywhere in the home can be fitted with an additional HEPA filter to remove particulates from bushfire smoke when needed. Wall mounted sprinklers protect from bushfire ember attack. 

PurePassiv was built using a panellised construction system from Carbonlite, its first with Envirotecture. Prefabrication offers many benefits, such as quality, waste minimisation and speed: it took just three days to stand up the walls and roof and make the building weathertight.

This was the first NSW home to achieve Passivhaus Premium status; at time of certification it was one of only 17 in the world. The design took into account the near-certainty of rising temperatures over the lifetime of the building and was stress tested using an IPCC scenario of ~4C of global warming by 2100. PurePasiv generates more energy than it uses in a year, even while powering a family EV. 

PurePassiv was also Australia’s first Green Star home, demonstrating the compatibility of the two standards. Universal accessibility guidelines were also considered. The ground floor is designed to be readily adapted and features wider doorways and level door sills. 

For more technical detail, see project #6610 on the PHI Passive House database.