On the drawing board: Hempcrete homestead

Nicola and Dan designed and built a hempcrete Passive House on a four-hectare homestead in Central Victoria, with an uncommon central sustainability feature: co-living.

The idea for Open Field Co-Living was conceived in a small, dark living room in a sharehouse in inner-city Melbourne. The cold wind was constantly being sucked through the house via the broken kitchen window, but we were too scared to ask the landlord to repair it. It was my seventh house in five years; almost every time, the house had been sold to a developer when our initial lease ended. To anyone who has rented recently, this story is probably sadly familiar.

As Dan and I huddled in the cold on a thrifted couch, we thought “There has got to be a better way to do housing”.

Dan and I met at a Students of Sustainability conference back in our university days, and got together a few years down the track. While sharing a lift one day, we began raving about how cool it would be to buy an aged care home and convert it into a vibrant co-living community: that’s when I knew I’d found my partner in crime.

Having read Peter Mares’ book No Place Like Home, which analyses the systemic causes of Australia’s housing crisis, we decided to take action and demonstrate what one model of sustainable, socially connected and secure housing could look like.

With Dan’s experience as a home energy assessor and eco-building designer, the opportunity to build our own sustainable house designed to suit the needs of co-living was too good to be missed. And with a baby on the way, we longed for a warm, stable home, and to share the parenting journey with a community of supportive friends.

The challenge
We set ourselves a challenge to create a home that:

1. Allows multiple families and individuals to live together, with a balance of communal facilities and private space
2. Integrates seamlessly with the permaculture systems of a semi-off-grid homestead: gardens, orchards and water systems
3. Supports a net zero transition by using almost no energy to heat and cool, and avoiding materials with high embodied energy such as concrete
4. Is resilient to the effects of climate change: heatwaves, droughts, floods, and resource scarcity
5. Creates a calm and healthy sanctuary for its occupants, with rich, natural, recycled and local materials that are breathable and chemical-free
6. Provides universal accessibility, making the house safer and easier for people with disabilities or injuries, older people, and families with young children
7. Is viable within current laws, building standards, council regulations, zoning and financial systems.

The result was a wheelchair-accessible rectangular hempcrete home built according to Passive House principles, with eight bedrooms and two satellite tiny houses for guests, and capacity to house 10 to 15 residents. Large north-facing windows fill the house with natural light, maximising energy efficiency and connecting to the gardens and bush beyond. The main resident bathroom was cleverly designed with the double basin separate from the toilet, shower and bath, meaning up to five people can use the facilities at the same time without impacting privacy.

All bedrooms and the main bathroom open off a single hallway on the west side of the house, forming a private, quiet residents’ wing. On the east side, the large kitchen, pantry, living areas, study, guest room and accessible bathroom make up the public communal space. This arrangement was very intentional; we’d observed from visiting other communities that having a physical design that encourages incidental social interaction is key to sustaining a sense of continued connection and togetherness.

As the quickest way to get this project off the ground, back in February 2021 Dan and I bought land under a basic joint tenancy model of ownership. Building one big ‘family home’ fitted seamlessly within current building regulations, council zoning laws and financing, so the building plans were approved quickly. We were grateful to have avoided the years, and mountain of administrative headaches, that some other cohousing groups have had to navigate to get finance and council approval for several separate dwellings on one lot.

During our initial research, we were surprised to read that of the ten per cent of communities that actually get off the ground, almost all are founded and funded by just one or two people with a strong vision, who then find others to join in at later stages. Founding our project as just two individuals made it simpler and faster in terms of legalities, financing, and decision-making, but required taking on all of the financial risk of the build and trusting that we would find other like-minded souls to join us once the house was ready for occupancy.

We never could have anticipated, though, that supply shortages due to Covid and global conflict would push the build price up by 30 per cent before we even locked in the building contract, and that over the two and a half years of planning and construction, mortgage interest rates would rise eleven times. We had very carefully planned our budget and factored in a buffer, but that buffer simply vanished!

We had decided to build the hempcrete part of the house ourselves over five weeks of working bees with many wonderful friends and natural building enthusiasts. We enlisted a hempcrete specialist to help us source the hemp from a local Victorian supplier, advise us on design details, and ensure the installation was smooth. It was an exhausting yet wonderfully rich community building exercise – in fact, four of the volunteers ended up moving in as housemates – but ultimately it wasn’t enough to save the budget from blowing out.

With each passing week, the builder’s invoices continued to roll in and the mortgage grew and grew, along with a sense of impending doom. We had maxed out our loan capacity and had run out of cash, but weren’t able to receive any rent until the house was finished. Adding fuel to the fire, by 2024 Australia had entered a cost-of-living crisis, which limited the rent that we could reasonably ask of residents.

However, somehow we forged ahead to get the build finished, and just in the nick of time we filled the house with some wonderfully aligned people. After navigating a mountain of challenges, we made it! We moved in together in June 2024 as a collective of 16 humans: 12 adults, three toddlers and one older kid, plus two dogs and four chickens.

The homesteading goal has been core to our vision of sustainable living here on our four hectares. We aim to meet many of our needs more locally, organically, with lower food miles and carbon emissions. And I’d say it’s also been the most fun part! House and garden working bee days have definitely been some of my favourite days here, and many other residents agree. In just a few months we have built a large chicken coop, expanded our chook flock, planted an orchard of 40 trees, made sauerkraut from our own cabbages, set up a bushcraft space, built a cob rocket stove and outdoor fire bath, and grown an absolute ton of vegetables. ‘Many hands make light work’ is definitely apt, and I think we all appreciate how much easier it is to manage such a large house and homestead with so many people contributing.

If I had my time again, I would explore other models of ownership and financing that reduce the pressure on two individuals and one relationship. But in the end, it did help us get the project off the ground, and if we hadn’t taken on that huge risk, this community would likely not exist. And we are very proud of it.