The home of Altereco Design director James Goodlet and studio manager Claire Thomas proves that sometimes, less is more.
Having designed countless sustainable and certified Passive Houses for clients over the years, the couple were keen to build their own high-performance home from scratch when they decided to leave Melbourne in 2021 for a life ‘closer to nature’.
‘We’ve always had a strong connection to the Surf Coast — James grew up in Apollo Bay — so we began searching for vacant land between lockdowns. This untouched corner block in Anglesea immediately caught our attention,’ Claire says.
They came up with a design for a modest footprint home. But after a particularly stressful fortnight at work, Claire questioned whether a simpler design might be the better approach.
‘This was actually our second design for the site,’ James says of the resulting ‘Harry High Performance House’. The original design wasn’t larger, but it was more complex to build, which meant higher costs.
‘At the time, we were living in a simple sheep shack in Freshwater Creek,’ he adds.
‘It made us reflect on what truly mattered in a home. We went back to the drawing board, aiming for something restrained yet beautiful — built with Passive House principles and sustainability at its core.’
As a result, they turned to the classic mid-century ‘beachcomber’ archetype, designed by influential Australian architect Nino Sydney, for inspiration.
These retro beach houses raised on stilts aligned with the couple’s vision to preserve as much of the natural landscape as possible, but also ensured the new build wouldn’t look out of place in the context of its small coastal town.
The exterior appears very similar to a classic beachcomber. A home office and garage are hidden in the under croft, and the vertical fibre cement boards are painted a nostalgic pastel blue. Inside, timber-lined ceilings, a terrazzo benchtop, and blackbutt doors create a warm and serene atmosphere, enhanced by views of the surrounding trees.
Perhaps one of the most important parts of the project’s sustainability is its size — spanning just 138-square-metres — and use of passive house principles to minimise energy consumption. All the appliances are electric, and a 6.6kW solar array and battery helps power the home.
‘The house is exceptionally comfortable year-round, maintaining a temperature between 18–25°C with minimal mechanical heating or cooling. The eaves are perfectly calculated to block summer sun while allowing winter warmth in,’ James says.
Despite being an accredited Passive House designer, James notes the project came up short of achieving the official certification, but for good reason.
They opted to install large sliding windows on the south side to maximise their leafy outlook, however this feature meant they ‘slightly exceeded’ the Passive House heating load threshold of 15 kWh per square metre by just 2kWh.
‘Given the scale of our house, this is still very efficient, and for us, the ability to connect visually with the outdoors outweighed the need to meet an arbitrary benchmark,’ James says.
It still exceeded the national 7-star benchmark for newly built homes, achieving a NatHERS rating of 7.4. At the end of the day, it was a compromise they were willing to make: ‘Simplicity is the key,’ he adds.
‘Clients, designers, and builders tend to get excited by the prospect of optimising to the nth degree. We learnt to always pare a decision back to the basics, gain clarity on what we wanted to achieve, before executing as best we could.’
