FIRST WE DESIGN – THEN WE BUILD
Elevate your living experience with our meticulously designed Passive Homes, optimised for Melbourne’s climate. Enjoy ultimate comfort while reducing your environmental impact.
Passive house design, or Passivhaus, follows strict design principles for ultra-low-energy buildings with excellent indoor air quality. It focuses on superinsulation, airtightness, and ventilation heat recovery to drastically reduce heating and cooling needs. Compared to standard homes, passive houses can lower energy use by up to 90%.
They often utilise passive cooling strategies like natural ventilation, shading, and thermal mass to stay comfortable year-round while working with the local climate. Achieving this standard requires specialised passive house architects and builders skilled in optimising the design and construction.
By capturing heat from sunlight, appliances, and occupants, passive houses provide superior comfort with minimal active heating or cooling required, making them highly energy-efficient and environmentally friendly.
Living in a passive house offers fantastic benefits, such as:
At RoomFour, we understand that building a passive house is a journey, and we’re here to guide you every step of the way.
Your journey begins with a Discovery Call, where we’ll discuss your vision, requirements, and budget for your home extension project. This allows us to understand your needs and provide expert guidance on extension ideas to enhance your living space and create your perfect home.
We then engage in a Feasibility and Sketch Design Study. This is the foundation stage and the most important part of your design process. It will help you understand your goals, what you want to achieve, what your cost will be and a full analysis of your project, along with preliminary sketches. Our experienced passive house architects take into account factors like orientation, climate, and local building standards to ensure your new Australian home meets the highest standards of energy efficiency. Click here to find out more on ‘Build Cost Estimate’.
The information gained from the Feasibility and Sketch Design Study now paves a clear and direct path for our team of skilled architects to then start creating your Passive House custom-designed home that perfectly aligns with your lifestyle, aesthetic preferences and goals.
Navigating the intricate world of council approvals and building permits can be daunting. However, our experienced professionals will handle all the necessary paperwork and ensure compliance with local council regulations and planning permissions, making the process seamless for you.
We use state-of-the-art software to model and optimise your passive house design to ensure energy performance, meeting all necessary efficiency standards. This attention to detail sets RoomFour apart in our pursuit of creating truly sustainable and comfortable living spaces.
When it’s time for construction, we partner with experienced and certified builders. They handle every aspect with care and precision, ensuring your new home in Australia is energy-efficient and built to the highest quality standards of the building industry.
At RoomFour, we have a proven track record in designing and constructing certified passive houses in Melbourne. Our portfolio showcases stunning, energy-efficient homes optimised for our city’s climate. We thoroughly understand Melbourne’s weather patterns so we can maximise comfort and energy savings.
Our comfortable homes maintain ideal temperatures year-round using superior insulation, airtightness, and energy recovery ventilation supplying fresh filtered air. Our unwavering quality standards ensure exceptional comfort, efficiency, and long-term value in your custom home while controlling construction costs.
Whether new construction or renovation, trust our expertise in passive house design and bring your dream home to life.
At RoomFour, we understand that designing and building a passive house is more than just creating an energy-efficient home – it’s about crafting a space that blends sustainability, comfort, and your personal style.
That’s why we’ve developed a comprehensive approach to passive house design, ensuring every aspect of your dream home is thoughtfully considered and executed.
Our team of architects and designers are not only highly skilled in their craft but also specifically qualified in passive house principles and building standards. With their expertise, you can rest assured that your home will be optimised for maximum energy efficiency while still being a comfortable and inviting space.
Before any home construction begins, we’ll work closely with you to understand your vision and preferences. Our designers will then meticulously plan every detail of your passive house, optimising its energy performance while ensuring it maintains the desired aesthetics you’ve envisioned. From the orientation to the layout, no stone will be left unturned.
One of the key principles of passive house design is minimising thermal bridging – areas where heat can easily transfer in or out of the building.
Our passive house construction methods and materials are specifically chosen to ensure minimal heat transfer, keeping your home at a comfortable temperature year-round while reducing your heating load and space heating needs.
We believe in using only the best building materials and systems specifically chosen for your passive house needs. From highly insulated walls and windows with triple glazing to cutting-edge recovery ventilation systems, every component of your home will work in harmony.
We’ll create an energy-efficient and sustainable construction that maximises solar gain and solar heating while minimising primary energy consumption.
Passive houses provide unbeatable comfort and energy efficiency through passive solar design principles and low energy consumption. With excellent insulation and airtightness, they maintain an ideal temperature year-round while drastically reducing space heating and cooling needs.
This leads to much lower primary energy bills and a smaller environmental footprint. The passive house standard ensures indoor air quality through heat recovery ventilation.
While passive house construction requires more upfront investment in things like insulation and high-performance windows, the long-term operating costs are significantly less.
Energy savings often allow a passive house to pay for itself over time compared to a standard home. An experienced passive house builder can manage upfront costs.
Absolutely! The passive house principles can be applied anywhere. An experienced passive house builder will ensure your home meets all the requirements for passive house certification, taking into account your local climate conditions. Many passive house architects have delivered certified projects worldwide.
For more information, check out our blog. The Passive House Institute and many regional organisations also have great online resources that explain the design and construction details in depth. Speaking with passive housebuilders and homeowners is also valuable. There are also training programs available for passive house certification too.
While they have some overlap, a passive house focuses on extreme energy efficiency through passive solar design, insulation and airtight construction. A net-zero home aims to produce as much primary energy as it consumes through solar heating and other renewables. Many houses in Australia combine both approaches for ultra-low energy use and passive cooling.
