Make a project home fit your block, not the other way around

The display home was perfect. Your block is not the display block.

Project homes are designed for a flat, north facing rectangle that does not exist on most streets. Yours might slope, face west, sit under a height control or catch the southerly straight off the lake. Put the catalogue plan down on that block unchanged and you get the daily consequences: bedrooms that cook in the afternoon, a living room that never sees the sun, a hallway that fights the view instead of framing it.

The building industry's answer is to flip the plan and call it sited. Ours is to actually design: keep the project home's economics, and adapt the plan to the block, the climate and the people who will live in it. We compared the two paths honestly in project home builder vs architect on the Central Coast. This service is the middle road between them.

What you get

Your preferred plan, adapted by an architect. You bring the project home design you already like. We adapt it to your site: orientation, room placement, window sizes and positions, outdoor connection, privacy from the neighbours. The result is still buildably close to the original, but it belongs on your block instead of merely sitting on it.

Passive solar thinking, for free in the same pass. Getting the living areas facing the right way and the glass in the right places is the cheapest comfort money can buy, because it costs the same to build a window in the right place as the wrong one. It just has to be drawn right before the slab is poured. This is where a new home earns back the design fee every summer and winter after.

A complete revision each round, at a fixed $2,200. Each revision is a full pass on the plan, delivered for you to sit with, share and test. Most projects take three rounds, so budget $6,600. You decide after every round whether the next one is worth it, which keeps you in control of the spend.

This is for you if

• You have chosen, or nearly chosen, a project home and a block on the Central Coast, and something about the fit nags at you.
• You want architect thinking on the plan without the fee of a fully bespoke design.
• Your block has a complication the catalogue never met: a slope, a view worth chasing, an awkward orientation, close neighbours.

It is not for you if you want a home designed from a blank sheet around how you live. That is our bespoke design service, and it is a different budget. It is also not for you if you have already signed a fixed contract that forbids plan changes; check that before you spend money adapting a plan the builder will not vary.

Why us for this

Shea is a NSW Registered Architect (registration 9748) who has designed everything from kitchen renovations to an 89 apartment seniors living development, and adapting a plan well is design work, not drafting. It means knowing which walls are doing structural work, which moves are cheap and which are expensive, and where one small change unlocks the whole plan. Clients like Mira came to us with a functional space and left with one that felt reimagined without losing its practicality. That is the standard we hold the humble project home to as well.

How it works

1. Start below and send us your chosen plan and your block details.
2. We review both and confirm the adaptation is worth doing. If the plan already fits your block well, we will tell you and save you the fee.
3. Each revision round: we adapt, you review, and you decide whether to go again.
4. When you are happy, you take the adapted concept to your builder, and if you need approval drawings we can talk about the next stage.