At the core of every project is an understanding of you - your lifestyle, your aspirations, and your story.
Every design maximises the aesthetic and functional opportunities presented by your site, the local climate, and the surrounding environment.
Each project results in a distinct architectural expression of you and your place within your environment - providing beauty, comfort, functionality, and harmony with nature.
The architectural design process is an act of distillation. Firstly, identifying all the opportunities, constraints, and variables of the project - then distilling that information through years of knowledge and design skill to achieve a functional and beautiful design that enriches your life.
Every good design needs a good brief. Understanding how you want your design to serve you is essential, which is why time is taken to get to know you and your aspirations before any design work beings.
Client Aspirations
A proper understanding of your aspirations is essential to enable a good design.
Budget
The budget is the foundation of every project from which all design decisions are considered - having this clearly defined at the beginning of a project is essential.
The opportunities of every site are different. A good design should respond to these unique opportunities, which is why BHA takes pride in offering a thorough site analysis, to ensure that the site opportunities are identified, enabling them to be incorporated in the design.
Natural Opportunities
Careful observation of the following site factors during the initiating site visit enables the design to maximise its potential.
Natural Beauty
The visual character of our natural environment is priceless, and provides a rich source of inspiration for architectural design and beauty. We like to draw inspiration from every site's natural beauty.
District Rules
The final site factor that dictates development of every site are the district planning rules, which can have significant impacts on the design's final appearance. Designing with these parameters in mind, and ensuring that your brief is met within these parameters is a fundamental part of the process.
Alongside conventional building methods/materials, BHA takes pride in being at the forefront of natural material use in architecture. This enables the incorporation of the health and sustainability benefits of these materials while simultaneously maximising the potential of the material's unique performance properties, and avoiding any potential downsides.
Low Toxicity
By selecting naturally durable materials, the need for chemical preservatives/toxins is minimised, which improves indoor air quality and reduces your exposure to harmful chemicals.
Sustainability
Usually, natural materials are a more sustainable choice. There are exceptions, however, but BHA has a thorough understanding of material sources and manufacturing processes, enabling well informed decisions about material sustainability.
Biophilic Design
The inclusion of natural elements in architecture is known to reduce stress and improve mental health by fostering a connection to nature, something BHA enjoys being able to offer to clients (refer to section below).
Natural Performance
Many natural materials have unique and exceptional performance properties when used well (many can perform badly when used poorly) - whether that's the thermal performance of wool insulation, the thermal mass of rammed earth, the moisture regulation of hempcrete - the list could go on!
Passive design is the design of a building with the aim of creating a healthy, warm, dry & comfortable space while also reducing energy consumption.
Here at BHA, our design process places priority on harnessing the opportunities provided by nature and building material properties to create passive comfort and passive energy efficiency. Modern building technologies/systems can also be specified in situations where the site fails to provide the necessary natural opportunities.
Below is a basic breakdown of the passive design process behind our projects.
Site Analysis
During the site analysis at the beginning of every project, careful attention is paid to the following passive-design-relevant aspects of site.
Spatial Placement
With the information gathered during the site visit, the layout and form of the house is conceptualised (in conjunction with the budget & brief, and other site observations) with the following considerations in mind.
Glazing Placement
The position, size, and operability of windows/glazed doors provides a great deal of opportunity when it comes to passive design (along with views/privacy/etc.)
Material Placement
The performance properties of building materials/methods can greatly enhance the utilisation of natural energy. Thermal mass and insulation are the two major material contributors to the thermal performance of a building.
Mechanical Additions
In the event that adequate passive energy performance hasn't been achieved through the above methods, the following mechanical additions can be used.
We believe in doing what we can to care for our environment - which is reflected in the way we design. Without sacrificing comfort, function or aesthetics, a building's environmental impact can be minimised within any budget through clever design.
We assess a building's environmental impact in two ways.
Embodied environmental impact is often overlooked. But here at BHA, it's an integral part of the design process/consideration. The following factors form the basis for embodied environmental impact considerations.
Material Sources
Applying a deep knowledge of materials and material sources in order to select those which have a high renewability, low extraction impact, low processing/manufacturing impact, and low transport requirements. When appropriate, we also enjoy using recycled materials as it's a great way to increase the sustainability of the design, while also introducing a layer of history and richness to the project's material palette.
Durability
Highly durable materials reduce the need for maintenance, and ultimately, replacement. By designing to maximise durability, embodied environmental impact is reduced. Likewise, materials with a shorter lifespan are selected based on their re-usability and/or biodegradability.
Beauty
Embodied impact is doubled at the point of a building's demolition (presuming a new building will replace the existing one). By designing to create beauty or a point of difference, we create value, which means that buildings are more likely to be preserved and maintained, as opposed to being demolished in the near future.
Construction Waste
The best way to minimise construction waste is through design.
We all enjoy the feeling of being connected with nature (the technical term for it is Biophilia). Not only does it feel great, but experiencing these connections with nature have been proven to offer some significant benefits for both ourselves and for the wider environment - which is why whenever possible, we like to include human-nature connections in our designs - to enable clients to enjoy the benefits of a life in harmony with nature.
Human Benefits
Countless scientific studies have concluded that exposure to nature is good for us (this article does a good job of summarising/compiling these findings).
Functional Benefits
Nature provides a bounty of opportunities that can be harnessed for functional benefits - from using the energy of the sun to warm a space, to capturing and re-using rain water, to using natural convection principles to drive ventilation. There's a lot on offer, and being aware of these opportunities when designing can result in some significant functional benefits for a building.
Environmental Benefits
Spending time in nature, and being exposed to the wonders of nature, promotes the development of our appreciation of nature (it's hard to appreciate something that you haven't experienced). This naturally leads to an increased desire to protect nature, and to make more environmentally conscious choices. Architecture can be designed with this in mind, to promote positive connections with nature, and therefore help inspire further environmental appreciation/protection.