The certified Living Building Challenge (LBC) project integrates 27 residential lots with an environmentally responsive and productive landscape located just under a kilometre from central Castlemaine. 

Responding to an ambitious objective of achieving best-practice in socially and environmentally sustainable housing, Emergent Studios (Bush Projects) worked in collaboration with Crosby Architects and the visionary clients in developing a landscape outcome that responded to site conditions strategically to address multi-layered sustainability targets. Adapting an integrated design approach throughout the process involved extensive workshops involving the consultant team, clients, local community members and prospective occupants, ecologists and academics.

The landscape-driven design approach responds to the site’s topographic condition, watershed, local vegetation, tree amenity and solar access mapping - combined with analysis of the site’s broader catchment - shaping the landscape design response ecologically and socially in optimising functional use, productive capacity and environmental value. 

The planning process was shaped by a collaborative process of consultation, including pre-development meetings undertaken with the Mount Alexander Shire Council as well as engagement with prospective residents and the wider Castlemaine community. A resident-led approach defined communal facilities, including a community house with a flat that can be booked by residents for visitors and a popular community workshop that is now in regular use by residents.

The masterplan responds to the site and brief’s conditions and requirements including existing overland flow of water through the site, grading terrain and the integration of 30% productive landscape use, as per the LBC’s Environmentally Sustainable Design requirements. The integrated extensive wicking bed garden systems support self-sufficiency, enabling prolific productive gardening by residents within challenging site conditions.

The masterplan utilises the site topography to introduce a sense of privacy between the dwellings, which are set across the higher points of the site, and the productive landscape below, arranged across a series of terraces that step down towards the site’s lowest point. 

The flow of water is a defining element of the masterplan centring around the conversion of an existing dam to a wetlands system that drains to a soak at the lowest point of the site, connecting to the broader local catchment. Ecologist and wetlands specialist Damien Cook was engaged to review this component of the design - now occupied by a diversity of local species.

Promoting opportunities for social interaction between residents, the design features integrated planters to the front fences and a shared promenade linking the townhouses and connecting each private garden to a centralised communal space. From the promenade, the terraces of communal productive garden allotments, orchards, chook runs, and beekeeping areas frame open spaces for gathering and passive recreation, including a firepit, open grassed areas bordered by low maintenance native and biodiverse indigenous planting.