Category: Design
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Resilience vs Sustainability
What’s the difference between resilience and sustainability? Is there a place for both? Is it even really that important? The utter darkness while driving around east Auckland early last Sunday reminded me of the similarly eerie calm we experienced while driving around Christchurch on February 23rd, 2011. A 21st century city without electricity is a…
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Map Wrap Gaps Taps and Apps
Over the last few years, I’ve developed this model for good home design: Map, wrap, gaps, taps and apps. A model for good home design: Map, wrap, gaps, taps and apps. Click To Tweet Map Map was an obvious (albeit later) addition to the original model. Good design starts with location. This is about where you…
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Leaky Buildings 2.0
Most of us are familiar with leaky buildings – the perfect storm of poor design, poor cladding systems and poor workmanship, culminating in allowing rain to get in. Now we’ve moved on and have cavities, more stringent weather-tightness checks and hopefully we like eaves again. So what’s leaky buildings 2.0? If we’ve dealt to the…
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How to Design Eco Friendly Homes
Lesley England knows how to design eco friendly homes and importantly for her, she knows how to attract the right clients who want her to design eco friendly homes. It’s all in the name – ecohabitats. Actually, that’s not completely true. The name ecohabitats does attract a lot of clients, but her great design work…
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Building Guide
Through his company, Aim High Publishing, Mark Graham owns and runs the Building Guide, the Design Guide and Bob – the Business of Building. But as Mark openly admits in our interview, he used to hate advertising – the very industry he worked in and now relies on. The difference today is that he knows he’s helping…
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Affordable Housing
I’ve tried to avoid the issue of affordable housing. It’s a term that gets used a lot and in all likelihood, the provision of affordable housing is going to be an election issue. I avoid it because it’s often brought up as a negative issue. As a problem. But when someone such as Daiman Otto…
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Green Building Design with Jessica Eyers
Jessica Eyers is a passionate advocate for sustainable, green design. As I discovered during this interview, Jessica is also really interested in the science of green building and understanding what works and what doesn’t work. Architecture & Inspiration Jessica completed a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Sheffield in the U.K. But it was…
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Black Pine Architects
Duncan Sinclair is the founder of Black Pine Architects. His practice and his home are in Whanganui, but thanks to the internet, his work can be anywhere. It’s About People Construction and architecture is technical work, but for Duncan it’s ultimately about people. Good buildings should look after the people that occupy them. Good buildings…
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Box Living
Dan Heyworth, General Manager of Box Living, is on a mission to improve the range and quality of houses available to New Zealanders. After returning to New Zealand from the UK a few years ago, Dan realised there are really only two main options for getting a house built, either going to a building company for…