The Green Building Show 2012: Tony Lawson

[greenbuild]

The Green Building Show EP 8 25/10/2012

In Australian Style, we will hear Tony Lawson, a building designer who has proven it’s possible to create a sustainable and eye-catching home within a tight budget.

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Read the transcript here:

CARLOS: Ok, I’m here today with Tony Lawson. He’s a building designer and owner of Lawson Design, a building design firm in Cannes. Thanks for being with us Tony.

TONY: You’re welcome.

CARLOS: Today we’re talking about a new home of yours in Greenwich Valley, also in Cannes, and this home is quite unusual from the pictures I’m seeing here Tony. And it’s also won several building association awards such as Best New Home and Most Sustainable Home. Can you tell us, what was the brief and how did you go about doing that?

TONY: Well, I was given a brief from the client to build a small, a very small, home on the edge of a big drop back in the rainforest in Cannes. We had to design it so that we didn’t do… didn’t touch the ground. It was already… we had to work with the ground that was given us. And part of the brief was a collection of really large furniture, doors and windows, and artefacts that had been collected over the years. And I had to design the house around these items. And it was also… they had a large collection of old telegraph poles, recycled timbers, a lot of old, 50 year old, hardwood that was on telegraph poles, that sort of thing.

CARLOS: Ok great. And you mentioned, Tony, that it’s a lightweight home. What lightweight materials did you use and why did you decide on a lightweight construction?

TONY: Well, in the tropics, lightweight is probably the best way to go. It doesn’t hold heat like heavy construction. Because it was hanging over the side of a cliff, lightweight was obviously an easy option. So we basically designed the skeleton of the house out of lightweight steel and we also then exposed all of that steel so it become the focal point of the house. And then we… this house is also very long and very narrow, so the weren’t large so that we could then build lightweight floors and rooms very quickly.

CARLOS: And what kind of lightweight product did you actually use?

TONY: Well, we used timber floors, lightweight floor, and decking. We had a catwalk on either side of the house, which was in essence an access, a passageway. And some of that decking came into the house to aid with the ventilation. And most other things were kind of gathered on roofing and walls just to eliminate maintenance and ongoing expense and use of materials.