THE dominance of flat-slab housing development in Queensland may be on the downturn, with the opening of an innovative display home village at Springfield, west of Brisbane, the Courier-Mail reported this week.
(prHWY.com) November 3, 2011 - Brisbane, Queensland, Australia -- What may be a recent innovation for some builders is just a way of doing things for Indigo Homes.
THE dominance of flat-slab housing development in Queensland may be on the downturn, with the opening of an innovative display home village at Springfield, west of Brisbane, the Courier-Mail reported this week.
"In what is thought to be an Australian first, all nine builders have created housing designs suitable for a sloping block," the paper said.
Springfield Lakes project manager Ian Murray says building around sloping topography is an art that has almost disappeared in the past 20 years.
Describing a sloping block as a huge positive for housing design, Murray says the concept has virtually been lost within the industry.
"If dealt with properly, a sloping block provides a fantastic end result," he says.
"You only have to look at the older areas like the inner-city suburbs of Brisbane to see that when you build off the topography of the existing land, every house has a view, you don't end up living in a sea of roofs."
The old way becomes new
Murray says that in generations gone by, building has always been done this way, and it's something that Indigo Homes director Chris La Franchi knows only too well.
La Franchi says that he'd noticed for a long time that other builders always said that building on a slope expensive was really expensive. "That's because lots of builders don't really want to do it," he says. "Their whole system is set up for slabs on flat ground. It's part of what makes project builders so cost-effective."
La Franchi, with an eye on the future and the fact that a number of Queensland developers have lots of sloping sites in their land banks decided to design a cost-effective way to deal with building on slopes.
Their range of Indigo Hillside homes, available to build in Brisbane and on the north coast to Cooroy and in the western corridor to Hattonvale, are split-level designs that are almost as fast to build as their normal homes, and very close to as cost-effective.
You can check out Indigo's range of Indigo Aspects here.
Split Level Designs
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