When it comes to creating your forever home, buying the right block can be one of the most important, and daunting, steps in the process.

Many homeowners feel unsure about how to assess a site, especially when it comes with constraints or planning requirements.

In this conversation, HOME Method members Fionna and Ed share how they found and secured a block with two significant trees, balanced risk with careful research, and assembled a collaborative design team to bring their vision to life.

Listen to the episode now.

Hello! This is Episode 377, and in it, I’m talking with HOME Method members Fionna and Ed. They’re based in Canberra, and are creating a beautiful, energy efficient and flexible home designed for their next chapter of life – a home that allows them to age in place, welcome family and friends, and accommodate their adult children when they come and go.

Fionna and Ed’s home is being built on a unique block with a spectacular old oak tree that takes up almost a third of the site. Their architectural design works around this tree through a series of three connected pavilions that make the most of light, outlook and connection to the garden.

In our conversation, you’ll hear how Fionna and Ed navigated purchasing this block, including conditional offers, tree protection laws, and some very determined problem-solving. Their story is such a great example of balancing tenacity with smart risk management, and shows how valuable, yet challenging, it can be to stay objective, even when you’ve fallen in love with a site.

We also talk about how they chose their architect, the importance of finding someone who listens deeply, and the design thinking behind creating a functional, energy efficient home that can adapt for visitors, future care, and changing needs over time.

Fionna and Ed share fantastic insights into designing for accessibility, the details they’ve included from the start, and how they’re approaching this project with their love of design and quality, as well as a commitment to sustainability and energy efficiency.

This episode is packed full of really useful insights, as Fionna and Ed have been really methodical and intentional in their approach, so if you have a tricky site for your project, a desire to create a functional home you can age in, an interest in energy efficient design, want a quality build outcome, or like Fionna, don’t want a butler’s pantry in your home, I know you’ll find it super helpful. 

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE NOW.

For timeline context, Fionna and Ed joined HOME Method in July 2023. At that point they had put a conditional offer on a property in December the year before, with settlement happening in April 2023. 

They hired their architects in June 2023, and joined HOME Method the following month. They signed a contract with their builders in October 2024, and are expecting completion of their project early next year, 2026.

 You’ll hear about the way Fionna and Ed managed their risk when purchasing their property before building, and learn more about how they sought advice, as well as rationalised the investment and worked through the obstacles. 

It can be really tricky in any project to remember that you’re making incremental steps along the way, and before you know it, you can have committed a lot of time, effort and money, and feel very emotionally attached to a particular outcome. 

In that process, it’s common to lose objectivity, and to worry about the sunk cost you’ve invested up to that point. 

However, if you’re able to remember what you’re seeking to achieve, and also recognise that there are many pathways to an ideal outcome, it helps you maintain objectivity in what can be a really emotional journey. 

It’s always worth remembering, so you don’t end up a long way down the wrong path, simply because you dug in and lost sight of the bigger picture.

I think there’s a big difference between being stubborn and being strategic – and strategy will always serve you much better in your project!

This is the transcript of my conversation with Fionna and Ed about their new build in Canberra, and the challenges they overcame with their block to create a site specific, flexible and sustainable design that will enable them to age in place and enjoy for years to come.

Amelia Lee
Well, Fionna and Ed, it is awesome to have you both here. I’m so looking forward to talking with you about your project and introducing you to the Undercover Architect community, because I know that you’ve got so much knowledge to share and your experience and all of the things in terms of making your project a reality. So thank you so much for being here. As we dive in, could I just get you first to perhaps introduce yourself and who your project is for? Who you’re actually creating this home for would be really good to know.

Fionna
Yes, so there’s Fionna and Ed, and mainly for us, though, we have had our 20 something youngest was living with us when we started, and has just bounced back home now for a while. And we’d always planned to have room for our kids to do that, so that was an important part of the brief for us. And we’re both in the semi-retired stage of life, and didn’t particularly want to downsize, but did want to age in place.

Amelia Lee
That’s a really interesting distinction, isn’t it, that you want to make the home work for you long-term, in terms of you being able to be there as you change in physicality and all of those kinds of things, but also then accommodating that ability for kids to bounce backwards and forwards, and knowing that you want to have some space. And I imagine too, for guests to come and visit, and people to stay.

Fionna
We have a lot of family and friends who come and stay, and I guess the other thing is really looking into the future, if one of us was quite ill and we needed a carer that had to stay over or live in or we needed two separate spaces because of illness. So it was designed with that sort of flexibility in mind.

Ed
Yeah, it’s been designed for the worst case, but it’s really been designed to take advantage of the nice location.

Fionna
Yes, yes. We both have sprawling hobbies.

Amelia Lee
And so, can you tell me a bit about the size of the home so people have an understanding of the rooms that you’ve got in it?

Ed
So, it’s essentially a six bedroom home because there are two studies. 

Fionna 
Two offices, yes.

Ed
Yes, two offices. It’s about 293 square metres of living area, plus the garage and then some external area. So all up, that’s about 400 square metres under the roof space. It’s built in three pods. Pod is the architectural term, connected by two nice walkways which provide good views to the large tree, which is a feature of the block, and to the gardens, which we hope will go in fairly soon. And it’s an east-west block, so we get the great northerly sun, taking advantage of that.

Amelia Lee
That’s fantastic. And do you actually got advice to purchase the block, and then you joined HOME Method about eight months after you made a conditional offer, and it was four months after settlement, you’d started working with the architect at that point. Can you talk about the process of getting that help before you bought the block and making that decision, and then what made you decide that HOME Method was going to be a helpful pathway for you?

Fionna
So, we were avid podcast listeners before we joined HOME Method. And I also want to say, we thought, “What else could possibly be behind the pay wall?” Because you’ve been so generous, and I thought, “But we have to join, because you made such a contribution.” And then we found there was lots behind the pay wall. So that was good. So when we looked at the block, it had two regulated trees on it. One’s the oak that we’re keeping that takes up 30% of the block with its strip line. So 30% of a 1200 metre block.

Amelia Lee
What an amazing tree.

Fionna
It is. It is. And the the arborist, when he looked at it, thinks it might be the oldest oak in Canberra, or it’s managed to mainline sewerage somewhere, and very healthy, and it’s beautiful. And the other one was a cypress pine, something like that. Bhutan Cypress. So the oaks on the south of the block. Cypress was right in the middle. There was a very small house on the block that was filled with mould and asbestos things, and the tree was right next to it. And so the block had sat there for a long time with nobody offering on it because they were intimidated by the trees, and that meant they were willing to listen to a conditional offer. And we sort of discussed that with the real estate agent, and we then got a company called Space Lab, and they do a lot of town planning. And we paid them to help us put in a tree damaging application for the Bhutan pine. And I should say at this point, the block we purchased was formally public housing, and so the chief ranger was arguing with the planning element of the same government. But we were initially unsuccessful, despite we had a fairly unhelpful advice of the chief ranger come out and say, “Oh no, I think it’s healthy enough.” And she kept on lecturing us about we should have looked after the plumbing better on the house. And we kept on going.

We don’t own it, but we just stuck to our guns on we’re not buying it unless this comes through. And when the turn down decision came through, there was a phone number and a signature block for someone in the Chief Rangers office. And they were really helpful. And first they said, “Look, get some light modelling done.” And we said to Space Lab, “What were the light modelling costs?” And it was something like $8,000. We were saying, “That doesn’t feel like a reasonable thing to ask us to do.” And everyone said, “Oh, don’t worry about it.” As soon as you put in a development application, they’ll let you. And it’s like, “Well, we don’t want to spend thousands on plants.”

Amelia Lee
That’s a big punt, isn’t it?

Fionna
And then I said, “Does the chief ranger have a discretion in the legislation?” And it turned out they did. So, they very kindly let me write some dot points that, basically said, “Look, you’re going to let us later.” We’ve got 30% canopy with it, which is what Canberra is trying to achieve without doing this. And so, they’re about 10 dot points, and that eventually tilted the balance in our favour. But we couldn’t have made that argument without getting the support from the town planners on modelling the block and showing just how far the drip line was and all those sorts of things. So, that was essentially what we did, and that really helped us, because we just got that certainty about we would be able to build something reasonable. And I think we started the tree preservation plan on the oak at that point. Or that was later.

Ed
Oh yes, I think so.

Fionna  07:24

Yeah, we knew we’d have enough space once that that pine was gone. So, that was what we did.

Yeah, and one of the builders we approached early also offered a block assessment service that said to us, “Buy something flat, let us check out the trees.” And of course, we didn’t take the tree advice.

Amelia Lee
What I love is the demonstration of your risk management alongside your tenacity and determination in that. I think it can be really tricky to remember as you set your heart on something, and you keep following that path, that you always have an opportunity to get up to helicopter view and walk away, or be more objective about it, because you have this sunk cost of both emotions and potentially financial costs in those incremental decisions moving you towards this outcome of trying to secure this block, but it’s clear that you were able to still maintain some objectivity about it. I can imagine, though, for you to have pursued it at that level, you would have really wanted this block, but not been willing to just then surrender to having to deal with difficult consequences of having to retain both trees and so, yeah, it’s a really great demonstration of holding those two things when it’s such a personal endeavour, but you also need to make, I suppose, logical and sensible decisions.

Fionna
It’s emotionally quite difficult, but I think we traded off uncomfortable before the purchase for uncomfortable after the purchase.

Yeah, that’s an awesome way of putting it, Fionna.

Ed
The fact that a lot of people had looked at the block, including developers and builders and nobody had said, “Yes, we’ll take the risk”, suggested to us that that the risk was too great. So we went conditional.

Fionna
Yes. And the other thing was that an almost identical block next door with the other half of the duplex that we demolished on it sold for about 20% more, 20%-25% more. So we could also say in our heads, “Well, we’ve spent a lot less than that on both the advice and all the implications that the tree management plan has in store for us.” So, that was the other great…

Amelia Lee
Great rationalisation.

Fionna
Yeah, rationalisation we held in our heads.

Amelia Lee
Yeah, I love it. Thank you for sharing that, it’s really great.

Fionna
We wouldn’t have got it. It’s a quite tightly held area. And we were just very lucky that we got it.

Amelia Lee
It doesn’t sound like luck to me. It sounds like proactive kind of behaviour. But it all paid off, which is really awesome. And so that explains why you demolish the existing house and decided to build a new house. Being an older home and possibly not having been very well-cared for throughout its life and that kind of stuff, it makes sense that that was beyond redemption in terms of a workable building.

Fionna
And when you look up the suburb, it says because it was built in about the 1940s, and it says famous for its large blocks and poorly-oriented houses, and it was, and no heritage listing rules, which across the road would have been.

Amelia Lee
Wow, you really did your homework. That’s fantastic. Now, can you think back to that time before you began the whole journey? You’ve got that arduous hoop jumping to actually secure the block. What were your impressions of building? What were you nervous about? What were you concerned about? How did you think about the whole thing, about building a new home?

Ed
Well, we’ve never done a home build. We’d done three renovations here, but our view of home building was that it was difficult and complex and for a certain type of person that was prepared to be interested in that. So we weren’t really interested in home building.

We were trying to find a place to age in place. We assumed there’d be a place we could find, and it turned out that everywhere we looked was sub optimal. And the idea of upgrading this place didn’t quite work either. We’ve got a nice house. We could have put a lift in, potentially, but we’re still on the side of a hill, so we’ve still got issues here. And so we started thinking about building a place, and came across a very nicely done placing curtain by one of the local builders. And that encouraged us to think, yes, something nice can be done in a cost effective manner if we can get the right block. Didn’t end up with either that builder or quite that budget.

Amelia Lee
You got to see it to believe it, hey?

Ed
And so at the time, it was all the COVID issues, or post-COVID issues, of budget overruns and resource constraints and manpower constraints, which was another reason to think, “Well, do we really want to get into building?” But fortunately, that hasn’t been nearly as bad as we’ve heard.

Amelia Lee
Oh, that’s awesome to hear. And you decided to work with an architect, and you’d been working with the architect for a little while when you jumped into HOME Method, can you talk about that process of choosing the architect and finding the right design professional to work with, and then, how all that went in terms of working towards your design?

Fionna
And oddly, while we hadn’t joined HOME Method, we had listened to the podcasts. So that made it really clear to us, we needed an architect versus, say, a building designer, partly because the block’s tricky. And we had an attempt at trying to find someone who might do the PAC Method. So we found our architect by interviewing builders.

Amelia Lee
Oh, wow.

Fionna
So one was the company that we’d seen the very nice aging in place building had three or two architects and a building designer they worked with. So we interviewed one of them. Then my sister had had two very nice renovations done by an up market builder, and he recommended Sonder, who we went with, which we’ll get to. And then the third thing was, because we were checking out builders and architects, we went and visited lots of people who’d used one of the builders.

And, turns out, we had friends of Ed’s who lived on the circuit we’ve built in. So they invited us around and they recommended their architect. So we ended up with three architects we were considering. And we interviewed them both twice. So, Wendy and Claire at Sonder had just set up business, but they’d both been senior architects in bigger commercial outfits, and they were working on one big renovation with Pichelmann (only mentioning names of people we eventually chose). Then, the one that worked with, I think how I’ll refer to them, but the first building company we looked at…

Ed
It was called the mid range builder.

Fionna
Yeah, the mid range builder.

Ed
Had been basically a generic builder, and we’re looking to move up market.

Fionna
And have. In fact, they’ve recently built a very nice or not as nice as ours, we think, but spec home about two blocks away in the same suburb. But their architect, because we asked for a second interview, influenced by you, to talk to who was actually going to be working on the design. And when we did the second interview, they didn’t bring that person along, and they forgot our brief. That was sort of…

Amelia Lee
Great, big red flag.

Ed
When he said, “Remind me, are you one story or two?” We thought, “Hmm, it’s a pretty basic thing to forget.”

Fionna
Yes.

Ed
The other thing is that that builder and that architect had a model where they would basically do a conceptual design, and then you were expected to sign up with the builder, and then they would run the design process and own the design, and you were locked in.

Amelia Lee
So it was like a design construct.

Fionna
It was a design construct, I was trying to think of the term. And we went and met the owners of the company, as opposed to the salesman, and we did say to them, “Are you willing to work with other architects?” So that didn’t take them out of the game just yet, as potentially a builder. And Wendy and Claire, we ended up working with Wendy from Sonders, just really listened to what we had to say. And their their quote was very detailed in terms of what they were going to do and for what price. And the third architect was a very prominent architect, and he was lovely, but we’d given him a brief, and he really wanted to go back to revisit the brief. And draw circles of how we use the house, and all sorts of things that you might do in usability. But we’d already done that, and he wouldn’t discuss price till we’d had multiple meetings. And we just thought personality wise, I felt it would drive me nuts because I wouldn’t get closure quickly enough on things.

Ed
We also had a look at houses that these people had designed, and we thought a couple of the houses that he designed didn’t meet our idea of usability.

Fionna
Yes, it’s like people with adolescent kids who didn’t have any bathroom doors, for example.

Amelia Lee
It sounds like you did really thorough research and thought about all the dimensions of how you were going to be able to interact with them, in terms of their ability to deliver a service, their capacity to provide you with the detailed information that you needed to have some level of comfort about it, and then also that personal communication alignment as well.

And it sounds like you took your time. A lot of people can worry that they need to make a decision quickly. It’s not correct, but they feel like they’re wasting the professional’s time, which is a challenging but understandable concern. But I love that you really did this very deliberately and thought about this being an important long term relationship. And in terms of your design goals, you had the aging in place that you’ve mentioned, sustainability, energy efficiency. How are you working through those key goals and thinking about them as you started working through the design? I imagine that they were locked into your brief as really important criteria for you.

Fionna
Yes, I’m just trying to think, because I guess we started with Wendy had a go at a floor plan, and we then just started working through how we’d use each space. We’ve done a couple of renovations here, and we’ve thought about it. And I guess both Ed and I, in different fields, have been design professionals, so we’re just used to working in that collaborative way and considering usability and those sorts of things.

Ed
The other thing is that Wendy is very good at looking things up and learning, as indeed are the builders. So when Fionna said we want aging in place, Wendy was off to understand platinum level requirements in detail and work them into the design and things like that. And likewise, things like the solar power issues and energy efficiency issues and so on. And it’s been the same with the builders. They really enjoy going off and finding a course to figure out how best to build the roof, for instance. So they’ve been good at that. And in the case of Wendy and Claire, they were both similar designers from big companies, often doing commercial buildings. So they were finding their feet in doing domestic buildings and using this as a learning experience too.

Fionna
And Wendy was doing her PhD, in parallel with social housing. I think the other thing was, both of us have been carers for elderly parents. So there are a number of things I just knew would work or wouldn’t work based on that. So for example, with the bathrooms, every toilet has railings. Because I had the experience, my dad was in a retirement village and they hadn’t installed railings. And there was this guy in Canberra that just specialises in fixing people’s railing. And Wendy’d go, “Do you need them now? Because they look a bit institutional.” And I kept on saying, “We’re going to figure out how we tack them around a corner so that we’ve got them now, because I want the person who builds the bathroom to install them so we know where everything is.” 

And for that, we used the commercial ambulant standard versus the accessibility standard, because that’s, in my mind, actually better. So there was that kind of thing. There were things, Wendy designed a really nice, solely solar oriented design for us. Our block has a set of gardens in the center of the circuit, and so we both wanted our offices to look out over the gardens, which was west. So I remember that being a bit of a it given me this nice northern facing office.

Amelia Lee
Are your offices near each other in the design, or are they at opposite opposite ends of the home?

Ed 
They’re just separated by the front door. Quite close.

Fionna
Quite close. Whereas, at the moment, this is mine, and his is downstairs, in theory.

Ed
Any flat surface.

Amelia Lee
And was the three pavilion design always what fell out to work around the tree? How is the building form of that?

Fionna
That was in play from the first drawing, and our real struggle was getting the layout for the living. There were two key tensions. One is we didn’t want the guest room in our pavilion, so we wanted to have our bedroom with no guests there, which means we ended up with a bit of extra flex space in that pavilion, in a slightly crowded front pavilion with offices in the guest space.

And the other thing was getting the living pavilion because I don’t like butler’s pantries, so I wanted the sight lines to work in terms of how you walk in and what you can see as you walk into the living pavilion. So there was quite a bit of just to-ing and fro-ing about how that could work given the restrictions of the tree. Wendy wanted the corridor to align straight through the house, and I wanted the kitchen area on one side of the corridor and the living areas on the other, and that ended up in encroaching more under the tree than we’ve might have been allowed to do. But we had a good team member, a consultancy called Gold Leaf.

Gold Leaf did the tree management plan. What he suggested is we just dug a trench where we wanted the kitchen to land and we could see no significant routes, so that let us have just that little bit more space on the south to make that work. But there were things like, I measured the space that we know we need for Christmas lunch when we’ve got extras, so that I knew I could fit that extra table in. And we played with different bits of furniture, those kind of things. And getting my office right, we realised we could run a slope right along the easement on one side that gave me enough room to have the normal office and some creative space. And it actually gives the house a quite charming look, because whichever angle you look at the house, it looks quite different.

So, looks small from the frontage, and then as you walk around it, because it’s called a design in the round, there’s a German term for it. So you get all these lovely different angles as you walk around it, which is quite nice.

Ed
Which particularly excites the builder.

Fionna
Yes.

Ed
They took me around saying, “Look, Ed, isn’t this wonderful? Wendy’s done such a good job on this view.” But yes, it does look nice in every angle, but different in every angle.

Fionna
Yeah.

Amelia Lee
That’s fantastic.

Fionna
Yeah. So a lot of working through how we’d use things. And we built in, there’s a lift for the sand mixer, all sorts of things to just help with…

Amelia Lee
What do you mean there’s a lift for the…?

Fionna
Sand mixer. So there’s a device, you know how sand mixers are quite heavy?

Amelia Lee
Yes.

Fionna
So it has its own little thing where it comes, lifts up and goes to bench level.

Amelia Lee
That’s fantastic.

Fionna
Yeah.

Amelia Lee
And you said you don’t like butler’s pantries. Because that’s quite a contrary view, given the way that a lot of people have it these days. So what was the decision around, what’s your thoughts on that?

Fionna
My thoughts are, people end up having a kitchen that’s an ornament, and cooking in a cupboard. So, we’ve got a preparing dinner station and a snacks and breakfast station at either end of the kitchen, so that there’s ways that the kitchen can be used by multiple people pretty readily. And I have to say, possibly our biggest extravagance in the house is we’ve got two zip taps, one at the breakfast end and one at the cooking end.

Amelia Lee
It’s probably cheaper than an entire butler’s pantry.

Fionna
That’s right. I just think, and we’ve had lots of people advise us, but we’ve got our friends with a really, really spectacular looking house and this enormous butler’s pantry that’s behind the other kitchen.

Amelia Lee
Yeah, it’s been an interesting development over the last decade or so, how much these have become prevalent in floor plans, not only in Australia, but in other parts of the world. So I love that you had clarity that it wasn’t for you, and yet there was still a way for you to accommodate creating a kitchen that does do that job of multiple users doing different jobs at different times of the day and at the same time.

I also love hearing how much you’ve intentionally thought about the different ways that this house needs to operate in different seasons for different groups of people, thinking about not having the guests near your bedroom, thinking about kitchen, the layout at Christmas time, and how all of that works. So what really comes through is just how methodically and intentionally you’ve thought about this design in all of its permutations, so that you can get the house being flexible and adaptable for all of those different life scenarios. And also that decision, we are going to put the grab rails in now so that I know that they are installed properly. I’m not going to have to go hunting for them down the track in terms of where the noggins are. We know that all the walls structure is going to work. And then we’ll just design the bathroom that it’s not this glaringly obvious thing that when you walk in, it looks like a disabled facility. So, it doesn’t look too utilitarian. It’s still like a family bathroom.

So, for me, what’s coming through clearly is you knew your own minds, like, you really knew it, and you found a designer who was able to bring that plus embrace this opportunity to learn. Were you nervous at all that they’d really had a lot of commercial experience and that your house might be their first foray into residential as their own company?

Fionna
Well, we said, the bottom line was we probably chose the least experienced, most expensive of the designers, and we had a moment when we got the second floor plan. The first was closer to our needs than the second. And we thought, “Oh”, and we actually got some advice from you.

And one of the advantages of HOME Method was we knew we could get that second opinion. But I think because we had our second workshop after that, and there was just this sense they were really listening, and there were two things that really, I think, helped the whole relationship then. I think we were on holiday straight after the first one, and we were exchanging emails, and we basically got out the floor plan and annotated it all, instead of trying to do it in an exchange of text. And that, being able to do that visually really helped all of us. And the other thing that I think Wendy might have even said when we signed the contract is she works on a three week turnaround. And so just knowing that was going to be the gap between our conversations, and the reason is that she’s so incredibly thorough that there’s just so much detail coming through. So setting those two ways of working, I think, just helped us.

And I think she really understood use of space and those sorts of things. And also, her PhD work was on social housing in in Vanuatu, so in a very domestic setting. But it was just really they listened. And so, we thought we’d be good. And in some ways the commercial experience was good, because there were things they knew about pragmatic materials and construction and all those sorts of things. So that experience was useful, I think.

Ed
The key elements of the design were arguably tracing paper and cups of tea.

Fionna
Yes, we would have six hour meetings.

Ed
And do a lot of cups of tea.

Fionna
Yes.

RESOURCES

Speaking to a Town Planning Consultant can be a useful first step when determining if a block of land will be suitable for your needs, and the potential approvals you’ll require. These resources explain more about what a Town Planner does:

• Episode 4 of Season 4 ‘What does a Town Planner do? | With Nuala Dewhurst of Griffin Planning’ >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/podcast-episode-4-what-does-a-town-planner-do-nuala-dewhurst/ 
• Council Rules and Approvals, and what you need to know | Interview with Peta Charles, Brisbane Town Planning >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/podcast-council-rules-approvals-peta-charles-brisbane-town-planning/ 

Episode 245 ‘Is the “Get it Right with Undercover Architect” Podcast Enough for Your Project?’
>>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/podcast-get-it-right-with-undercover-architect-is-it-enough/ 

Access the support and guidance you need (like Fionna and Ed did) to be confident and empowered when renovating and building your family home inside my flagship online program, HOME METHOD
>>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/courses/the-home-method/

Learn more about how to interview and select the right builder with the Choose Your Builder mini-course >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/courses/choose-your-builder 

My free ’44 Ways’ E-Book will simplify sustainability for you, and help you create a healthy, low tox and sustainable home – whatever your dreams, your location or your budget. Access your copy here >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/ways