South Australian Housing Trust Seaton is predicated as a demonstration project for The Housing Trust and for the wider Seaton area for the delivery of social and affordable housing within an existing but evolving suburb of Adelaide.
Our involvement on the project commenced with the application of our studio process of curiosity, insight and craft.
The curiosity phase of the project involved the testing of the brief, understanding the project metrics and researching case studies from South Australia, state wide and Europe. This research was framed by an innate appreciation that we needed to understand the target demographic to deliver an insight into how this project will respond to their needs and requirements.
Our research gave us a deeper understanding of how social and affordable housing needs to deliver on a sense of ownership, permanence, dignity and inclusion and create a sense of community that is passive and opportunistic and not engineered or forced.
Car parking is screened by single storey townhouse type homes at the ground floor. These homes offer a different type of tenure and respond to the notion that many of the target demographic live alone and therefore seek company from pets — so they require garden space and easy access to the street.
At the upper levels the apartments are designed to be a single footprint size. This single footprint size is then configured such that wet area setdowns are consistent in every dwelling, but through exhaustive and considered layout development, a range of homeowners can ‘adapt’ their homes to better suit their needs. This range covers everything from work from home young professionals to recent retirees to those with accessibility requirements. Through this approach we have achieved a solution which is both adaptable and future proofed - meaning the building can grow and change as the tenure model develops.
Another key component of this project is the pursuit of emerging construction technologies including CLT (cross-laminated timber) methodologies. The reasons for the use of mass timber are two-fold. Firstly it is a clear commitment to reduce the embodied carbon of these buildings. Secondly it is a mandate to seek progressive technologies which can be manufactured off-site and installed in shorter time frames — therefore responding to many of the issues relating on-site construction, delays and cost issues.
