How To Maximise Your Surrounds When Building

Whether your site enjoys glorious ocean views or a simple vista over your garden, creating a strong connection to your location is essential to designing a home with impact. Doing so allows you to maximise the opportunities presented by your surrounds and achieve a home that realises its full potential.

At SX Constructions, we believe that good design is an investment in your land. The best way to achieve this is to engage an expert design and build team who understand how to create a site-specific, intelligent home just for you.

While placing a mass-produced house design on your land may save you money in the short term, it will leave you with a home that doesn’t respond to the unique aspects of your site and location.

Here are some tips to help you maximise the natural beauty and opportunities presented by your surrounds with a customised home design.

Engage the right professionals

Maximising and embracing the key features of your surroundings shouldn’t be a task you encounter alone. This is because the right architects, designers and builders know how to design a home that both connects with and responds to its environment.

At SX Constructions, we offer unique design and construction services, so that whatever your site’s shape and size, unique views and positioning can be maximised. Our team are experts at helping you seamlessly connect to your home’s outdoor environment through carefully considered design and construction methods.

However, we also thrive when collaborating with people who share our understanding of and passion for environmentally conscious design. We’ll happily work with your chosen architect or designer to create a home that makes the most of your location.

Create a connection to the outdoors

There is nothing quite like the ecosystem located just outside your front door. Whether it’s the sound of birds chirping, waves crashing on the sand, or even trees rustling in the afternoon breeze, the calming quality of nature cannot be understated. Let it in!

Oversized doors and windows are a fantastic way to connect the inside with the out. Whether they look out onto an outdoor living area or a picturesque view, they’ll both lighten up your home and introduce natural vistas that improve the overall ambience. Enormous sliding doors are a popular option for coastal environments. When they are open it can create the impression that an entire wall has been removed, giving a sense of freedom. Floor to ceiling windows can achieve a similar effect, as seen in the way our Mitti Street home brings in the gorgeous views of Noosa National Park.

Incorporating Passive Design Principles

The best home designs are those that respond to their natural environments. Incorporating passive design principles is a great way to maximise your surrounds by harnessing the elements to ensure your home remains as comfortable as possible all year round.

This includes carefully considering your home’s orientation and window placement to maximise northern light and capture dominant breezes. By incorporating these simple, yet effective passive design principles, you can expect a temperate, light-filled home with less need for artificial heating and cooling – saving you money on bills and reducing your ecological footprint.

These principles are perfectly highlighted in our Mitti Street project. Designed to feature large windows in virtually every area of the house, the window placement not only maximises natural light and airflow, but also ensures that the surrounding natural landscape can be enjoyed at every opportunity.

Choose the right materials

When building a home in a location with close proximity to a natural landscape, material selection is often one of the most important decisions you’ll make. Homes that enjoy coastal views will be subjected to harsher weather conditions than your standard homes – think UV light, saltwater, and strong winds. This means that when choosing materials, you need to consider not only what the house looks like now, but how it may look in 5, 10, or 20 years time.

Hard-wearing materials that will stand the test of time in your home’s particular environment are key. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach – for example, a weatherboard home situated in a rainforest would be more likely to rot or grow mould from the humidity, while a steel-clad beachfront home may lose its appeal due to rust and corrosion over the years.

Our Little Cove knockdown project faced this challenge. Set only metres from the surf as well as being situated on the fringe of Noosa National Park, the original dwelling was beyond repair. The combination of salty air and a thick rainforest canopy above made the house prone to corrosion and mould.

With this in mind, we selected hard-wearing materials, ensuring that this residence would be low maintenance and withstand the test of time. The generously sized windows ensure that this property enjoys views from every room in the house. Meanwhile, the face brick and standing seam metal cladding ensure that the home can meet the demands of its location, without aesthetic compromise.

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To make the most of your home’s unique access to the Sunshine Coast’s beautiful landscape, get in touch with the team at SX Constructions today.