Custom home design in Sydney that takes the site seriously, the brief seriously, and your budget seriously.

We’re a building design practice specialising in custom residential homes and Passivhaus design for Sydney and the broader NSW market. Sydney is one of the most complex places in the country to build constrained sites, steep terrain, Heritage overlays, council DAs that take time and we’ve built the experience to navigate all of it without losing sight of what you’re actually trying to create.

Custom Home Design in Sydney

Sydney land is expensive. That means the design has to work harder than almost anywhere else in the country extracting maximum value from the site, reading the orientation correctly, managing views and privacy in suburbs where houses sit close together, and making sure every square meter is genuinely useful.

We design homes that are genuinely custom: no pattern books, no recycled floor plans, no designs that could have been built anywhere. Each project starts with a thorough reading of the site its aspect, its slope, its streetscape, its neighbours and a proper conversation about how you actually use your home day to day.

Whether that’s a terrace extension in Paddington that needs to work within a Heritage conservation area, a steeply sloping block in Castlecrag that wants a split level response, a knockdown rebuild in Baulkham Hills on a standard suburban lot, or a compact dual occupancy in the Inner West the approach is the same. Understand the site. Understand the brief. Design something that couldn’t have come from anywhere else.

Passivhaus Design — Sydney

Sydney’s climate is genuinely temperate warm summers, mild winters, with enough seasonal variation that a well-designed home needs to handle both. Most Sydney homes don’t handle either particularly well: they overheat in January and lose heat through poorly insulated walls and single-glazed windows in July.

Passivhaus design solves this properly. Rather than relying on mechanical heating and cooling to compensate for a leaky, poorly insulated building, Passivhaus homes are designed from the ground up to stay comfortable year-round through the performance of the building envelope itself. In Sydney’s climate, that means significantly lower energy bills, a quieter interior, and a home that’s genuinely pleasant to live in without having to think about it.

Our Sydney Passivhaus designs are built around:

•      High-performance insulation in walls, roof and floor calibrated for Sydney’s temperate mixed climate zone

•      Double or triple glazed windows and doors with thermally broken frames that eliminate cold bridging

•      Airtight construction with mechanical heat recovery ventilation delivering continuous filtered fresh air

•      Careful solar design maximising winter sun, controlling summer heat gain through shading and orientation

We design to full certified Passivhaus standard or apply passive house principles selectively, depending on the project. Either way, the outcome is a home that performs significantly better than a standard Sydney build and that will continue to appreciate that advantage as energy costs rise.

Knockdown Rebuild — Sydney

Sydney’s established suburbs are full of homes that haven’t kept pace with their land value. The block is good the right suburb, the right street, close to schools or transport or the coast but the house is tired, poorly configured, or simply too small for the way a family wants to live.

A knockdown rebuild is often the most cost-effective path to a home that actually works. You’re not retrofitting around someone else’s decisions. You’re starting with a clean site and a blank brief, and designing exactly what you need.

We manage the full process from site assessment through to construction documentation, including navigating the relevant council DA pathway, coordinating demolition, and working through any Heritage, tree preservation, or flood planning constraints that apply to your site. Sydney’s planning environment is complex every LGA has its own LEP and DCP, and the overlays vary significantly across the city. We know how to read them and design within them without unnecessarily limiting the outcome.

Narrow Lot Homes

Narrow lots are a fact of life across much of Sydney particularly in the Inner West, the Eastern Suburbs, and the older parts of the North Shore, where subdivision patterns from a century ago left frontages that modern design has to work hard to make the most of.

Designing well on a narrow lot is a specific discipline. It requires a clear understanding of how light moves through the site across the day, how to create privacy from adjacent properties without closing the home in, how to sequence spaces so the house feels generous rather than compressed, and how to meet the DCP requirements for setbacks, FSR and height without losing the floor area that justifies the project.

We design narrow lot homes in Sydney that work hard from the street to the rear boundary homes where the constraints have shaped something interesting rather than something compromised.

Dual Occupancy Design

Dual occupancy has become one of the most sought-after development types across Sydney driven by high land values, changing household structures, and councils increasingly supporting gentle densification in established residential zones.

We design dual occupancy homes where both dwellings are genuinely liveable not a main residence and an afterthought. That means thinking carefully about how the two homes relate to each other on the site, how privacy is maintained between them, how each gets adequate natural light and outdoor space, and how the overall composition reads from the street.

We work through council feasibility with you at the outset checking zoning, lot size minimums, and DCP controls before the design goes anywhere so you’re not investing in a design that can’t be approved.

Split Level Homes

Sydney’s topography is one of its defining characteristics and one of its greatest opportunities for residential design. The harbour suburbs, the Northern Beaches, the Illawarra escarpment, the Blue Mountains foothills: much of the city’s most desirable land sits on slopes that make conventional flat-slab construction either impossible or a waste of what the site is offering.

We design split level homes that use the terrain rather than flatten it. Done well, a split level home on a Sydney slope can capture views that a flat-site home could never achieve, create natural separation between public and private zones without a corridor, and produce architecture that feels genuinely site-specific which is exactly what Sydney’s landscape calls for.

We’ve designed split level homes across Sydney’s North Shore, Northern Beaches, and eastern harbour suburbs, as well as on acreage sites in the Blue Mountains and Southern Highlands.

Why Work With Us on Your Sydney Home?

Sydney’s planning system is one of the most complex in Australia. Every council has its own LEP and DCP. Heritage conservation areas cover large parts of the inner city. SEPP provisions interact with local controls in ways that aren’t always obvious. Flood, bushfire, and foreshore overlays add further layers in specific locations. And the DA process itself neighbour notification, potential objections, assessment timeframes can add months to a project if the application isn’t put together carefully.

We understand this environment. We know how to read a planning certificate, identify the constraints that actually matter for your site, and design a home that achieves what you’re after within the controls that apply rather than discovering the constraints halfway through the design process.

We also bring Passivhaus expertise that most Sydney building designers don’t have which means if high performance is on your list, we can integrate it from the concept stage rather than bolt it on later.

How We Work

1. Site & Brief

We start with a thorough assessment of your site planning controls, orientation, constraints, opportunities and a proper conversation about your brief. What you need, how you live, what the project has to achieve.

2. Concept Design

We develop design options that respond directly to the site and the brief. You’ll see real ideas with enough resolution to understand what each one means not vague sketches that leave everything to the imagination.

3. Design Development

Once the concept is confirmed, we develop it fully: materials, detailing, structural coordination, energy performance strategy. The design development stage is where good ideas become buildable buildings.

4. DA Documentation & Lodgement

We prepare the complete DA package for council drawings, reports, shadow diagrams, BASIX certificates, and any specialist documentation required. We coordinate with structural engineers, surveyors, and other consultants, and manage the lodgement and assessment process on your behalf.

5. Construction Certificate & Build

After DA approval we prepare construction certificate documentation and can stay involved through the build reviewing shop drawings, conducting inspections, and making sure the finished home matches the intent of the design.

If you’re thinking about building a custom home in Sydney — a new build, a knockdown rebuild, a Passivhaus, a dual occupancy, or anything else — we’d like to hear about it.

Get in touch for an initial conversation. We’ll talk through your site, your brief, and whether we’re the right fit for the project. No obligation, no sales pitch.