A home designed for you, your site and how you actually live

You will live in this house for decades. The design takes months. Do the maths.

A house is the largest thing most families ever build, and the decisions made on paper, before anyone lifts a hammer, decide almost everything: how the winter sun reaches the kitchen, whether the bedrooms stay cool in February, whether the house frames the view or turns its back on it, whether it still works when the kids are teenagers.

Project homes answer those questions with an average. A bespoke design answers them with you. Your block, your climate, your routines, your budget, drawn from a blank sheet by an architect whose job is to notice what you would never think to ask for. The difference lasts as long as the house does; our guide to how much it costs to build on the Central Coast puts the fee in context against the whole project.

What you get

A design that starts with listening. Before we draw anything we learn how you live: who cooks, who works from home, where the dog sleeps, what you argue about in your current house. The brief that comes out of those conversations is the real foundation of the design.

Sketches you can fall in love with. Shea travelled the world on the Parker Scholarship drawing buildings by hand, and that is still how our designs begin: hand sketches with watercolour, the kind of drawings clients tell us brought their vision to life better than any CAD render. You will see and shape the design while it is still warm, not after it has hardened into technical drawings.

A site read by an architect, not a template. Orientation, breezes, slope, neighbours, views, overlays. On the Central Coast that includes the things this region specialises in: bushfire, flood and steep ground. The house is designed into its site, which is why no two of our projects look alike.

The approval pathway handled. From concept through DA and CC, or CDC where it applies, with the drawings and documentation council needs. We deal with the process so you deal with the decisions.

Honesty about money, all the way through. We will tell you if the budget and the brief disagree, and which one should give. It is your money, and pretending otherwise until tender time helps nobody.

This is for you if

• You own, or are buying, a Central Coast block and want a new home designed around your family rather than adapted from a catalogue.
• Your existing house is good but not right, and a major renovation or addition could make it the house you stay in.
• Your site is the kind that scares project builders: steep, bushy, flood affected, tightly constrained, or blessed with a view worth designing for.

It is not for you if the catalogue plan already fits your block and your life; our cheaper project home concept service exists for exactly that case, and we will point you to it when it is the better answer.

Why us

Shea is a NSW Registered Architect (registration 9748) with a Master of Architecture, and has taken projects from first sketch to completion across the Central Coast: waterfront homes at Woy Woy, a strawbale house at Narara Ecovillage, renovations, additions and an 89 apartment seniors living development. Dave brings postgraduate project management to the practical side, which is why our projects tend to arrive at council prepared rather than hopeful. And because we live here, the person who sketches your home is the same person who walks your street.

How it works

1. Book the $220 Initial Consultation below. It is credited toward your fee if you proceed.
2. We visit the site, take your brief and give you a fixed fee proposal, stage by stage.
3. Design begins with sketches and conversation, and hardens into approval documentation only once you love it.