Project: Halo House
Architects: Breathe Architecture
Project Team: Jeremy McLeod, Madeline Sewall, Fairley Batch
Location: Melbourne, Vic, Australia
Area: 332 m2
Photography: Dianna Snape
Halo House was designed by Breathe Architecture with landscape design by Eckersley Garden Architecture. Breathe explain the concept of a “halo effect” of enhanced activity in & around the house, similar to that of an iceberg in the ocean. Many of you will be familiar with the idea of the halo effect, whereby we tend to assess a person’s characteristics and skills positively if our overall impression of the person is good, and negatively if our impression of them is not so good. It’s the cognitive bias behind the adage “first impressions last.”
The home was scaled to house a large family & home business, with Breathe’s customary sustainable design features. These included the use of recycled materials, a large solar PV array, electric heat pumps for hydronic heating & hot water, rain water tanks, as well as passive solar design features, operable shading & low impact material selections.
The aesthetic brief was for Nordic modernism; with Victorian ash sourced as a suitable local replacement for imported northern-European timber, the desired effect was achieved in a way that was consistent with the architects’ well-known MO for sustainability.
