Why Target the Living Building Challenge?

The Living Building Challenge provides an elegant framework to guide the regenerative design, construction and operation of our home. While some people may prefer to start with a blank page, we chose instead to apply a world leading framework so we could benefit from some of the best thinking globally on ‘what good looks like’.

The Living Building Challenge is a 7 Petal, 20 Imperative framework based around the compelling idea that every act of construction should make the world a better place. This is where we need to head when it comes to single family homes and every other building. We love the Living Building Challenge because it is outcome-focused, systems-based and performance-certified. It leaves no space for greenwashing or false promises - the ‘proof is in the pudding’ as the only way to get certified is to demonstrate that your building does what you said it would over a 12 month performance period. We haven’t chosen to do everything - unfortunately our resources and the capacity of the single family building industry can only take us so far. Our target is Living Building Challenge Core + Energy Petal certification. This means we need to achieve 10 Core Imperatives and then an 11th Imperative to make our home energy positive. We will make significant progress towards sustainable materials and water treatment but won’t achieve some of the requirements necessary for full Living Building Certification.

So of the roughly 100,000 new single family homes built every year, how many are targeting or achieving the Living Building Challenge? We understand that the answer is around 2, not including our project. There are some other wonderful residential projects like The Paddock, an ecovillage located in Castlemaine, which is also targeting Living Building Challenge but these are larger multiple dwelling developments. While there are an increasing number of net zero energy, net zero carbon or Passive House certified single family home projects in Australia, these projects don’t embrace the holistic and regenerative outcomes included in the Living Building Challenge.

We hope to show that the Living Building Challenge framework can serve as an inspirational and practical framework for single family home projects.