“We imagined a beautiful carbon-negative house that inspires others. Our goal is for our home to generate more energy by 2050 than was used to create and operate it. This includes material production, construction, operation and eventual disposal. It’s ambitious!”
- Jurgen, owner
Holocene House
The house is like being in nature. Canopied in plants, water flows through like a rainforest creek, and every room opens to the outdoors. Balancing residents’ health and comfort with environmental performance, the carbon-negative home is the first in Australia to be certified by the international Active House Alliance.
Natural chemical-free swimming pool with biofilter pond contributes to the thermal mass of the design and cools warm breezes in summer
First Active House certified in Australia
Hydronic heating and cooling in-slab with radiators via heat pump system keeps the home comfortable in all seasons
Grey water system captures and filters water from showers, baths, wash basins and laundry water to irrigate lawn and gardens
Recycling and donation of demolished joinery, bricks, salvaged timber and plants from original dwelling
Low volatile organic compounds (VOC) materials and finishes
Energy self-sufficiency with a 66-panel photovoltaic (PV) system producing 26.4kW of solar power with Tesla battery storage
Native plant selection based on local and coastal ecology to help with bandicoot preservation and management
Tesla electric car and electric bicycle charging stations
A heat pump provides hot water and heats the swimming pool
15kL rainwater harvesting system with underground storage tank supplies bathrooms, pool and irrigation systems
Re-use of excavated materials in landscaping, driveway and yard, plus timber offcuts used in feature joinery
Holocene House sets the standard for regenerative living in the Northern Beaches.
Designed and built for the family’s needs, now and into the future.
Project Team
Carmen Chan – Project Architect
Hayden Co’burn – Project Architect
Nathan Krstevski – Foreman
Alex Bonic - Leading Hand
Damien Arnup - Skilled Labour
Tallon Creber - Skilled Labour
Loretta Law – Project Manager
Clinton Cole – Architect + Builder
Previous
Barry Bradley – Foreman
Ryan Ng - Project Architect
Collaborators
Consultants and subcontractors
Landscape Architect - Duncan Gibbs
Interior Stylist - Jase Sullivan
Structural Engineer – ROR Consulting Engineers
Geotechnical Engineer - Witt Consulting
Plumbing – JH Gordon
Electrical – D2E Hybrid Automation
Landscaping – Land Forms
Doors & Windows – AHJ Architectural Hardwood Joinery
Carpentry - Red Oak Carpentry, North South Carpentry
Painting – Orange Painting
Glazing – Gerrys Glass
Tiling - North Set Tiling
Structural Steel – Tenze Engineering
Roofing – Flash Metal Roofing
Photovoltaics - SolarPro
About this home
The brief
CplusC was chosen to create a home for a young couple with two children in Sydney’s beach suburb of Manly. The couple’s vision was for a highly sustainable and regenerative home with open plan living. They imagined a bright, warm and green space that opened to the natural world. They expected it to be breathable, private and toxin-free. Embracing the views in all directions, they wanted to disconnect from neighbouring buildings, vehicles and the street below. In their off-grid sanctuary, they could grow their own food, read a book in a hammock, supervise their kids from all living spaces around the low-maintenance natural freshwater swimming pool – plus go cycling or surfing whenever they wanted. The design brief required a master bedroom suite, two bedrooms for the children, a home office, a self-contained guest room plus a playroom where the kids could express their creativity. In short: a bespoke house tailored to the family’s lifestyle with holistic sustainable systems integrated into the architectural design.
The site
The location is one of unique beauty and tranquility. At the rear, it gives onto a national park, with a delightful outlook over coastal heath. At the ocean-facing frontage, it boasts million-dollar views toward Shelly Beach. The existing house harvested these views from the front upper levels.
Like neighbouring properties, the house was set back from the front boundary, with covered parking and upper-level terraces forward of the building line. A gently-sloped driveway edged by stone garden beds leads up from the street. Strategic orientation and positioning was essential to preserve privacy and views for the new home and the neighbouring properties’ upper-level terraces and windows. Preserving the property’s rocky sandstone outcrops, existing shrubs and a frangipani tree informed the landscape design. The heritage sandstone block bushfire wall to the rear would also remain. Beyond it, a bushfire corridor of open grassy land separates the property from the national park, enhancing the serene views by acting as ‘borrowed landscape’.
The national park brought special obligations: residents are required to maintain a bandicoot corridor to protect these endangered faunae. For this reason, the bushfire wall has openings to allow bandicoots to pass through, and outdoor lighting must be kept to a minimum so these nocturnal animals can move around at night and forage undisturbed.
The design
CplusC’s concept for Holocene House was inspired by the owners’ love of the outdoors and the experience of rainforests, rivers and rocks. “We wanted our home to feel like the outdoors every day - like camping in the woods but with the luxury of a house and being close to the city,” says Karin.
“When we asked the clients how they wanted the house to feel they told us about walking knee deep through Eli Creek on K’gari. Light bouncing off the water. Leaves dancing off the top of the trees. How can you not get excited?” says principal architect Clinton Cole.
The owners were also passionate about sustainability. “We imagined a beautiful carbon-positive house that inspires others,’ says Jurgen. “Our goal is for our home to generate more energy by 2050 than was used to create and operate it. This includes material production, construction, operation and eventual disposal. It’s ambitious!”
Early ideas for a three-storey home with all windows having views to the ocean were discarded. It didn’t feel right.
“All the buildings on the street turn their backs to the coastal heath behind them. Every room is drinking in that sea view – that’s the design priority. Our clients weren’t sucked in by that,” says Clinton. “To them, the coastal heath was just as important as the ocean view. We asked ourselves: how can we make the house part of this landscape? That led us to a completely different paradigm: every room poised around a water source, with bedrooms at the tranquil rear.”
The clients’ desire for a natural pool became the heart of the concept, with the living space built around it. Water cascades from natural landforms at the rear of the home, running like a rainforest creek between dramatic living spaces and an expansive outdoor deck. To create the ambience of a rainforest floor, a canopy of flourishing plants stretches overhead. They’re growing on an eclectic structure of timber, structural steel and translucent jade-coloured lattices of fibre-reinforced plastic (FRP). All the rooms give onto this flowing outdoor living space and are protected by this canopy. Dappled light bounces into them from the pool.
“The design response was really about nature. The clients inspired us to open the home to the outdoors so you feel like you’re under trees and sky,” says Clinton. “It’s the opposite to homes where everything’s so well-insulated and sealed you barely interact with the outside world. In our concept, the home is permeable and receptive to the elements. You accept thermal nuances – temperatures are not static and you feel wind and rain. And the landscape is not just stuff out a window: it’s a living breathing part of the home. The home is formed around natural land features and has a creek running through it, every room partaking of it.”
An early design featuring two wings of interlocking pavilions was too complex and costly. To resolve this, the team explored alternative floor plans while retaining the key design idea.
Jurgen says: “We invited CplusC to push the boundaries. And they did. The first concept was over the top, but we loved it, especially the indoor/outdoor flow and making the natural pool part of the house. It challenged us too – how would it work to cross a bridge over the pool to get from our bedroom to the kitchen? We love how it evolved even more. Many of the ideas were brought over but got more practical and cost effective.”
The final design is linear, with stacked volumes on the southern side and a small home office on the north. The site topography presented challenges, with a fall of four to five metres from the back to the front of the site. Earlier designs had stepped terracing across multiple levels. For accessibility and practicality, we reduced this to three levels: the garage on level one, the pool, kitchen, home office and living spaces on level two, and the bedrooms, guest room and roof terrace on level three. By connecting interior spaces to roof gardens, the watercourse and private open spaces, the design invites everyone to share the rainforest feel and experience it from different perspectives.
Clinton named the home after the Holocene, a period of time before the current Anthropocene era, where temperatures were unusually stable and warm, and humans thrived. The architectural design looks to this era as inspiration for how we can live in symbiosis with the planet in the future.
Clinton explains: “As a world community our thinking about how we use our resources is shifting. But architecture is lagging behind. Most bespoke homes are all about bigger and more – six-car garages, monumental footprints. Holocene House proposes a different set of aspirations. It asks: what if we invest in different choices? What happens when we turn away from excess and toward nature? What does human-centred architecture look like now on a fragile planet? Holocene House sets an intention: let’s focus on sustaining life and giving our children a future.”
In a project as innovative and boundary-pushing as Holocene House, each spatial quality, landscape condition, material construction method, performance requirement and energy system demanded unique responses across every corner of the home and the sprawling site. Complex details resolved with simple solutions took an incredible amount of energy from the team, but a passive, site-sensitive design emerged as a result.
Holocene House earned Australia’s first Active House certification in 2023, testament to how carefully the design balances the health and comfort of residents with environmental performance. The house scored an extraordinary 1.64 on a range of indicators measuring comfort, energy use and impact on the environment. (To quality as an Active House, projects must score less than 2.5.) The certification is awarded by the Active House Alliance, an international non-profit that’s working to create healthier and more comfortable lives through buildings that emphasise wellbeing and sustainability.
Our manifesto
Climate change must be reversed, and human beings must become sustainable in every aspect of their lives. Le Corbusier famously said that ‘A house is a machine for living in’. If we are to survive the next 100 years a house must be ‘a machine for sustaining life’. Architecture that is not only beautiful: an architecture which generates and stores power; which harvests and recycles water; which produces fruit, vegetables, fish and eggs; which recycles and reuses the waste it produces.
The build
Construction ran from February 2021 to early 2023. This was an extremely difficult time for the construction industry, which was grappling with both the COVID-19 pandemic and La Niña, a climate pattern that inundated Sydney with months of rain including two one-in-a-hundred-year deluges. The build timeline was impacted in several ways.
The pandemic brought a series of unforeseen and unavoidable delays. As lockdowns began, skilled contractors dispersed, and industry-wide labour shortages bit hard. In the aftermath, labour and materials costs rose steeply. Employees were headhunted. Worse, materials were difficult to obtain – timbers that usually took a week to source weren’t delivered for two to three months. The CplusC team was forced to stockpile essential materials onsite to avoid further delays. This in itself caused problems as it limited the available work and storage space on the narrow site, making construction more difficult. Then the rains came.
Coming out of a 20-year drought, Sydney experienced massive storms. Water poured into the construction site through the mandated bandicoot openings. The site flooded twice. Materials stored there were damaged and even washed away.
There was a lot to learn from the flooding events. We had to rethink the entire stormwater management plan and change the landscape design to help manage future water flows from the national park and ensure neighbours would not be impacted in future by extreme weather events. This involved digging new trenches of a civic scale, plus overflows to future-proof site drainage. We also worked diplomatically with the neighbours as builder/designers to improve climate resilience and manage flooding.
Originally, excavated sandstone was to be re-used. But we found it was not suitable for re-use in load-bearing applications, with the stone’s integrity varying greatly across the site. The project engineers had to adapt structural plans to suit onsite conditions as they were discovered, working closely with our architects to make sure the result stayed true to the original design intent.
Strict bushfire compliance and construction detailing plus bandicoot protection measures also increased the complexity of the build.
The house is totally bespoke, with every element uniquely designed and fabricated to achieve ambitious sustainability goals. This made the design and build particularly complex. With tight coordination across our integrated team of architects, project managers and builders and proactive communication with the owners we minimised all challenges and weather delays to complete the home.
“We love the design and build process,” says Karin. “We built many prototypes during the build to help us make the many detailed decisions. We stopped by as often as we could and appreciated that the folks on site were always welcoming. It's very fulfilling seeing plans become reality.”
“We love the design and build process… We stopped by as often as we could and appreciated that the folks on site were always welcoming.”
- Karin, owner
The result
A rainforest glade
Entering the home, you make your way through the entrance gate into an enchanted world. Crossing an entry pond, you step from stone to stone and climb up a set of stairs alongside a cascading waterfall to a glass door that opens directly into the living space. All around you is what feels like a quiet rainforest creek shaded by plants and open to the natural world. The air is filled with the play of water, a light and soundscape awash in colour from the stained glass windows in large panels to the northeast and northwest. It’s playful and rejuvenating all at once.
“We loved the concept already, but the house feels even better than we expected,” says Jurgen. “The first time we walked in, we were very happy. It was warm and inviting. We felt a sense of accomplishment. And we were curious about how it would feel throughout the year.”
A veil of plants
A canopy of plants spreads overhead, creating a semi-transparent veil that shades the home naturally, allowing dappled sunlight to pour through. Air and rain can permeate this breathable space, keeping you connected to nature. With more than 20 floating planters, a little forest is growing and will eventually stream down into the whole space.
“Eventually the canopy will resemble tree canopies above, with leaves swaying in the wind and water dropping like rainfall into the tranquil watercourse below. It’s a contemporary interpretation of a landscape and environment, invoking memories of our human experience in nature,” says Clinton.
A rainforest creek
The heart of the home is the natural swimming pool, fed by ponds carved into natural rocky outcrops at the rear. Passing through stepped polishing ponds, abundant reed beds and inlets filtered through charcoal pebbles, the water enters the pool running along the living space and cascades in a waterfall down to the home’s entrance. Dark tiles enhance the feeling of a natural stream.
Just as in a rainforest creek, this network of natural features works with the sun’s UV rays to provide a biofiltration system that cleans and aerates the water as it circulates toward the street then back to the rear of the home. Water from the home enters a grey water filter and irrigates the lush garden planting. This filter and pump are the only mechanical devices in the pool system. Because the pool has automatic balancing and no chemicals, it’s very low maintenance – it’s a simple matter of cleaning the filter once a week to keep the pool healthy.
The result is a beautiful lap pool that doesn’t just sit in the space – it flows through it. The owners can paddle their feet, swim, and float, just as in a creek lined with bush rocks and trees. Or they can hang out at its edge with a book, lounging in the cargo net suspended over the waterfall.
“It’s the first natural pool we’ve been involved with that has become a built reality. We understood how simple and beneficial to the clients and the environment they are,” Clinton says. “We approached the pool design and system as another source of water to feed plants and encourage native wildlife.”
In their element
The three-level home’s long, narrow profile artfully captures the sun all day and all year round and carefully follows the site topography so natural undulations and sandstone outcrops are part of the experience of living there. All levels connect to the pool and garden to create the feeling of indoor-outdoor living. The structure is so permeable that you’re not always protected from the outdoors – wind blows through, rain streams in, sunlight plays on the surfaces.
“Now we’ve lived in the house for several months, we’re still very happy. We’re discovering things all the time – like changing light during the day and pleasing small details,” says Karin. “We’re happy with our home’s usability and function – it performs well during the cold and in the heat. We feel we made mostly the right decisions.”
A sacred space
Through large stained glass panels in the double-height front living space, Shelly Beach is perfectly framed, washed in colour. The stained glass deconstructs the view, inviting people to take a different perspective on the way water panoramas are worshipped, even fetishised, in a harbour city like Sydney. Turning away from the view and into the living space, the panel’s unconventional patchwork pattern creates beautiful and unexpected light effects that uplift and delight – a reminder that here, what’s sacred is the relationship with nature, and sustaining ourselves and our family within it.
Karin says: “We love the coloured windows. Especially during winter when the sun is flatter, or on greyish days. They lighten the mood. The coloured reflections change throughout the day. We are so happy that we went with them – it was a risky move and so worth it. They do trigger controversial comments!”
A roof garden
Of course, the iconic coastal views don’t go unnoticed. But they’re experienced discreetly from a delightful private outdoor space at the top of the building, accessible via a compact spiral stairway. Neighbouring properties have end-to-end balconies on multiple levels – here the approach is more modest. An inconspicuous rooftop garden offers views to Shelly Beach. There’s a dwarf apple tree that will one day produce fruit. This sensitive approach creates a private and intimate space where the clients can quietly enjoy the view.
“Having multiple areas to hang out is great. Each room has a different feel, so we can pick one based on mood or time of the day. On the weekend, we usually have breakfast either in the outdoor room or in the rooftop garden,” says Jurgen.
Kitchen
The kitchen is bisected by an expansive 9.2-metre-long island benchtop made from locally sourced recycled hardwood. There’s plenty of room for the kids to study while their parents are cooking.
Jurgen says: “The kitchen is the centre of the house and it works even better than we expected. It brings us together as a family and with our friends. The long bench is awesome for gathering. We cook more together, flowing back and forth between the cooking and dining areas.”
The kitchen joinery is built from Paperock with little niches that give the experience of dappled light falling onto the surfaces. “We cut the holes out of the cabinetry to suggest the reflection of sunlight through the trees – the random pattern suggests the pleasing hit-and-miss effect of leaf-filtered light,” says Clinton.
“The daybed is the place to hang out,” says Jurgen. “It’s constantly used and we’re so happy it’s big – initially we thought it would be way too big. Kids come down to play or read. We open and close doors depending on the wind, changing the character of the room.”
Art room
Across the deck from the kitchen is a generous room for the children. It’s an airy space with only fixed joinery along one wall to encourage creative play, whether on low tables or on canvas sprawled on the floor. There’s easy access to both the pool and the back yard. Parents can supervise all these areas discreetly from the main living area, fostering independence.
Home office
The clients like to walk while thinking, so the first-floor office is separated from the rest of the home by an outside walkway. This creates a distinct space for work, promoting work-life balance. Stunning coastal views unfold through large windows. A toilet is tucked away in the curved wall. A scalloped concrete ceiling relief becomes a beacon of light when seen from the street in the evening, reflecting the roof garden above.
Second floor
Upstairs is the library. Beyond is a guest room, the children’s bedrooms and the main bedroom, with three ensuite bathrooms. All bedroom doors open toward the canopy space and a deck that overlooks the pool. In this way, everything tends toward the rainforest creek at the centre of the house and everyone interacts with the outdoors as they go about their day. The main bedroom extends this sensibility toward the national park at the rear of the home. With a long daybed for contemplating the beautiful coastal heath through a big picture window, it’s a quiet retreat that breathes calm and peace.
Garage
Cut into local sandstone, the garage was an interesting challenge for the CplusC team. In line with the design vision of permeability to the elements, it’s not sealed up. Instead, it’s open to the weather. To make it secure, it’s enclosed by stainless steel wires. The creek flows down through it to the waterfall at the front of the house, where it is recycled back into the system.
The garage prioritises an active lifestyle over cars, providing easy access to surfboards and bikes. There’s only one car, provisioned by a Tesla car charging station. A custom designed and hand-crafted outdoor shower stops sand being tracked into the house from the beach.
The garage is also the engine room of the sustainable home. Most of its space is allocated to plant, including filtration systems, heat pumps and battery storage for solar energy generated by the rooftop PV array.
A mini urban farm
The home’s yard takes a step toward self-sufficiency, reducing the carbon footprint of the food residents eat. There’s a productive fruit, vegetable and herb garden at the back. Garden clippings, leaves and other biodegradable waste are composted in a mulching system to boost soil fertility. Food scraps are fed to the chickens, which lay eggs to feed the family. There’s even a garden shed to store tools. It’s as close to off-grid as you can get in Australia’s biggest city.
Materials
Every aspect of the home’s design and construction emphasises low impact on the environment in the short and long term, particularly the careful consideration given to the materials used throughout.
The clients were passionate about minimising toxins from all finishes and building materials. CplusC is equally committed. But while we have extensive experience in sourcing highly sustainable materials, compromises had to be made because some materials were difficult to obtain or unaffordable for a family home.
For the exterior, we settled on spotted gum hardwood Shou Sugi Ban, a Japanese method of pre-charring the timber. Shou Sugi Ban is low maintenance, durable and has low environmental impact. These choices meant the home exterior required very little priming, painting or other potentially toxic treatment and will not need to be repainted in future as the materials weather naturally. Importantly, they also enabled us to achieve a Bushfire Attack Level (BAL) rating of 29, meeting the Australian standard for fire-proofing homes in such close proximity to bushland.
For the interiors, low chemical compound materials combine to make the construction extremely nontoxic. Joinery was built from low-formaldehyde plywood and Paperock, a durable composite building material made from reconstituted paper pulp with no toxic elements. All finishes are low-VOC.
Other measures to reduce the home’s environmental footprint include the low embodied energy materials used throughout, such as Boral Envisia, a type of lower carbon concrete, and low-maintenance fibre-reinforced plastic (FRP) used to create the latticework effect in the canopy.
Sustainably sourced and recycled timber were used extensively. Certified timber included: Shou Sugi Ban cladding; thermally modified vulcanised timber Abodo used throughout for ceiling linings; bulletproof and maintenance-free, paint-free Barestone panels for internal wall linings; plus the kiln-dried Australian hardwoods used in feature joinery, stair treads, external ceiling linings, and expressed structural timber. Hardwood doors, windows, benchtops and flooring use recycled timber sourced from locally demolished inter-war homes, reducing the need to cut down new trees.
The construction also prioritised recycling and re-use of existing materials released by the demolition of the existing home and excavation of the site. The timber, concrete and local sandstone that resulted were used in the landscaping, driveway and rear yard.
Fully automated
The owners can interact with the home easily using a smartphone. They can control lights, locks, louvres, blinds, batteries, thermal comfort, security, irrigation, the solar array and even cleaning and maintenance of the floor and pool. It’s simple to keep an eye on things and adjust services at home or on the go. Sensors in planters and gardens read when plants need water and make sure they have what they need to grow luxuriantly.
Climate resilient
The home acts as a water catchment or reservoir, creating its own climate-resilient water system that does not require mains supply. The pool captures rainfall and water from the irrigation system mounted in the canopy above it. Rainwater and grey water from the home’s washing machine and showers are used for irrigation. Rainwater stored in a 15-kilolitre underground tank provides enough water for daily needs, including showers, washing machines and toilets. In times of drought, residents can live off their own water for months and there’s adequate water for the garden to thrive. The reservoir’s healthy water and carefully chosen native plants help nurture coastal ecology – and our friends the bandicoots.
Regenerative
The home is designed to be self-sustaining and produce more than it consumes. Powered by renewable energy, it’s completely self-sufficient and in fact generates ten percent more energy than residents need. Solar power generated by the PV system on the roof and stored in the onsite battery is enough to charge an electric car plus keep the home comfortable year-round via the hydronic heating and cooling system in the concrete slab and carefully placed radiators. An energy-efficient heat pump provides hot water. It also heats the pool so people can swim in cooler months.
Immense learnings
“The clients were influential. They were so committed to regenerative design principles and willing to dive into all the granular details. Their idea for a natural pool really inspired us. We learned immensely from collaborating with them and it’s amazing how many ideas are still flowing from this project, giving life to ideas we’re working on now,” says Clinton.