Name: NEVER TOO SMALL: Sustainable Compact Family Bungalow in Australian Bush, 42sqm/452sqft
Uploaded: 2025-02-01T19:05:33.000Z
Duration: 14 min 9 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

We love living in this beautiful environment, there's so much native wildlife about which is really special.

The house is in the Currumbin Valley near the border of Queensland and New South Wales in Australia.

It's situated in the Currumbin Eco-Village which is an international award winning sustainable community.

We wanted to create a sustainable and functional but beautiful home that was full of light and air and a compact footprint, but also a machine for living.

We lived in LA before we moved to Currumbin, so we definitely took a lot of inspiration from Californian modernism, which also in turn took a lot of inspiration from seafaring and the functionality of boat cabins.

I'm Ashby and I'm a choreographer and owner of this house.

I live here with my husband Jamison who works in film music and our two year old daughter.

We designed this house alongside Sarah Morley at EcoStrux.

This stylishly designed multifunctional screen seamlessly complements any interior design.

It combines both work and play, perfect for small spaces.

We're talking about the LG MyView smart monitor.

It even has an optional stand to make it easy to move around your home.

The LG MyView smart monitor features built in web OS, providing direct access to various streaming services.

So you can binge watch your favourite content, listen to music, or enjoy Never Too Small, all on a 31.5 inch 4K IPS display with superbly sharp images.

The LG MyView smart monitor also supports AirPlay 2 and Bluetooth, allowing you to wirelessly mirror your phone, tablet, or laptop screen.

You can even use its home office tools to work from home without a PC.

One screen, endless possibilities for both work and play in small spaces.

The house is 42 square metres, but we also have a deck and a courtyard.

We bought our block of land at the end of 2020, and we've spent some time both thinking about what to design, but then also designing and designing, and then we eventually completed the build in 2023.

Our block is really very private, bordered on three sides by a nature reserve with a creek down the bottom of the valley.

It feels as though we're deep in the bush, but we're actually only ten minutes away from the beach and the southern gold coast.

Where the house is now was actually a crop of juvenile camphor laurel trees, which we did remove, but apart from that we tried to be as sensitive as we could to the natural shape of the block.

The floor plan is based on a simple rectangular shape with minimal separation of rooms.

Instead we have zones which are divided by height and soft visual barriers to create privacy.

Each zone has a specific function and character so that you can experience the house in different ways throughout the day.

We were eager to take advantage of the sloping block to create levels of privacy and openness whilst also being light on the earth of construction.

At the entrance is a short corridor, open on one side to the kitchen below.

To the left is a Tasmanian blackwood bench top made by Peach Furniture, and this is where we place our keys and things when we get in.

We also added a coat hook at the entrance for jackets and bags.

The interior is clad with whitewashed OSB with Tasmanian oak and stainless steel trim.

The walls and floors and ceiling are all the same materials, which creates visual continuity.

Our designer Sarah suggested OSB because it's essentially a recycled material which fits with the ethos of the village.

Stepping down into the lower level is our living space, which is dominated by a generous built-in banquette.

We made the banquette really long and deep so that we could easily stretch out for daps.

There's storage underneath, and we have the cushions cut from hospital-grade foam.

They're all covered with organic undried cotton, which can easily be removed and washed in the washing machine.

The whole lower level is encased in tall, narrow windows, which reach up to the high ceiling.

The windows alternate between fixed glass and louvers, which we can adjust to create maximum cross-ventilation and keep the house cool.

Jackson also made a handy hook from an aluminium tube to reach the higher windows for me.

The kitchen is all stainless steel and is galley-style, taking references from a ship kitchen.

We added a wall fan which points down at the kitchen.

It's mostly there in case we burn something, since we don't have a range hood, but it's also good to have on hot days when there's no breeze.

But with the louver windows, we rarely need it.

The kitchen is quite generous as we wanted it to be functional for long-term daily use.

The benchtops are all custom-made, but our drawers and all the carcasses are actually IKEA.

We chose to have all drawers in the kitchen rather than cupboards, which we find to be so much more ergonomic, because you can't have anything hidden up the back that you forget about for months upon months.

We also have a beautiful blackwood shelf next to the fridge nook for glasses and crockery.

We have a single-drawer Fisher & Paykel dishwasher installed under the sink, and a stand-alone 60cm smeg cooktop for the oven.

And we decided not to continue the kickboard under the stove, because the space underneath is really handy for storing our heavy cast iron pots.

Having a level of peace and quiet really pays off when you're living in such a small space.

Jonathan, his job is all about sound, so he's really sensitive to noise.

Our Mitsubishi fridge is like the Tardis, it runs super quietly and it's fantastic for the space.

You can't hear it if you're sitting in the living room or in the bedroom, and the same goes for our dishwasher.

You can run it even when the baby's sleeping.

We use a tensioned wire across the window behind the sink for cloths and scrubbers to hang out to dry, which has settled a long-standing argument between Jonathan and I on how to best dry a cloth.

The edge of our breakfast fence has been cut to an angle so that when you walk by you don't hit your hip.

And it was cantilevered so that we could sit under it and have morning coffee when the weather outside doesn't permit eating out there.

But I also use it for food prep and serving.

We don't have any walls dividing the main bedroom from the rest of the living space.

However, because of the split level and the dividing furniture, it really feels quite private.

For extra privacy, we can enclose the sleeping area with our curtains, which run along the ceiling on repurposed stainless steel balustrade wire.

We chose just 100% natural linen because it's still light and breezy, allows airflow and light to come through.

We actually were trying to emulate the feeling of a rice paper lantern.

Our dividing furniture mirrors the pattern created by the windows.

It is intended as a beautiful piece of furniture, but doubles as a writing desk and has a steel cabinet for extra storage.

Our wardrobe is actually just a wardrobe nook, which we've installed our own drawers and railings to create a wardrobe space that's just right for us.

And we close off the wardrobe with curtains, which actually extend past the wardrobe rather than having a separate door to the bedroom.

The bed is from Melbourne-based designer Object Utility, and it has no protruding corners or legs, making it easier to walk around.

We have a shelf above the bed for books, but there's also power, ethernet and HDMI connections for a projector.

We have a triptych by artist Miriam Montgomery, and we have quite a few of her pieces in the house, including in our baby's room.

We have two adjustable wall lamps, one in the kitchen and one over the bed.

They were recommended by a designer friend, and we just love them.

Their aesthetic suits the house so well, and they're really nice to use.

Behind the main sleeping area is our child's room, and it was actually something that we added mid-build.

It's been so great to sleep close to the little one at night, and it means that she's away from the more active kitchen and lounge areas while she's asleep, and we're not.

If it's not used as a bedroom, the space would also make a really great study or even extravagant dressing room with additional wardrobe.

The bathroom and laundry is tiled with Japanese ceramic tiles, which match the beautiful red dirt that we have on the block, and it looks really amazing against the white OSB and the brushed nickel tackware.

We have an extra-long bathroom bench, underneath which we have a full-sized washing machine and dryer, and above the bench we also have tensioned wire, again, for hanging items to  In the shower, we tried to maximise space, so we have a simple glass divider, and we have tackware and shelving that doesn't intrude into your actual shower.

One of my favourite things in the shower is actually the Hinoki wood shower stool, which I sit on when I'm giving Will a little shower bath.

When the bathroom door is open, it actually closes off the toilet nook, so the toilet's never in your direct line of sight.

We have shelving above the toilet for more storage, and we also have a really great artwork by Lucas Grogan that's one of our favourites as well.

The vanity light was just a simple flat white disc, and we weren't really sure how we felt about it, but we also had this beautiful circle artwork by Joseph Johnson that we'd been given by Jameson's mother Gil.

One day we just sort of thought, this fits here, and we put it on the light, and that's one of our favourite things.

Next to the shower we have a door which leads out to a private courtyard and the clothesline, which is also made from repurposed stainless steel balustrade wire.

The clothesline is super long and facilitates a full set of sheets and laundry for the whole family.

We painted some of the pavers red, again just for fun, and at the end of our courtyard is a locker for gardening tools and the rainwater tank.

Leading out from the living space we have these beautiful tall French doors, which we mostly keep open because it's just such beautiful weather here, beautiful environment.

The deck is FRP, which is painted the same colour as the exterior render.

There's a round metal table and four vintage steel chairs, as well as two stainless steel and canvas swing chairs, which we had custom made.

Wide steps lead down onto a nice little patch of lawn, which Jonathan lovingly laid himself for Will to play around on, but we also have a natural rockery with native Australian plants in there.

There's also neighbours with chickens, with one chicken particularly that comes and lays eggs under our rosemary every morning.

Oh, you're being so careful, that's good.

When designing a small space, I think it was really valuable to us to decide what was important to us in our everyday life and prioritise functionality in those spaces.

We worked with a mandate of efficiency and not compromise.

For me, the kitchen is really like the heart of the home, and sleeping, those are two really important things.

Jonathan spent a really long time asking me questions and listening to all the little things that bugged me about other places we'd lived, and things that I loved and dreamt about, and I think we have it.