'Welcome to the Jungle House' in Sydney was a turning point for CplusC Architects + Builders. With a focus on sustainability, the firm harnesses BIM, Revit and lifecycle assessment to bring its innovative designs to life
This is an edited excerpt from an article that originally appeared on Autodesk Customer Stories
There is a building in Sydney, Australia, called Welcome to the Jungle House. It is a family home that's aptly named for two reasons.
First, it pays homage to a song by Guns N’ Roses, a favourite band of Clinton Cole, whose firm CplusC Architects + Builders part renovated, designed and built it.
Second, from its location on a small site near the University of Sydney, it has flora peeking from windows and overflowing from rooftop garden planters.
‘I may have questionable music taste,’ says Cole, ‘but there's some logic to the name. It’s a concrete house full of plants in the middle of the city.’
It also has something more: its own ecosystem. The house gets direct sunlight from morning through to the afternoon owing to its corner location, but a range of sustainable design features allows the house to remain comfortable even during hot Australian summers with little need for air conditioning.
Mess to masterpiece
By re-imagining a Victorian-era ‘shop top’ house (originally a ground-floor butcher shop and residence above), the renovation has preserved a piece of local heritage and part of Sydney’s early-20th century urban fabric.
Although the original interior was long gone, local heritage-protection laws required the house’s speckled masonry exterior to be preserved despite the building having been constructed over a former creek bed.
The practice had to fully disassemble the walls, drill deep underground to secure the foundations, and then re-erect them. While costly, rebuilding this way gave the building best-of-both worlds sustainable credentials.
Where other architects and builders might have given up, Cole perservered because he could see what others couldn’t: that mess could become masterpiece. ‘In my experience, constraints can make great outcomes,’ he says.
When a practice finds its signature project
Welcome to the Jungle House was completed in 2018 and marked a turning point for CplusC. It helped Cole, and his senior project architect/partner Hayden Co’burn, make innovative, sustainably designed homes the firm’s signature.
‘This was us getting back to what we were passionate about, what we’re good at and what we know is of benefit to the broader community,’ says Cole.
The practice creates innovative, bespoke residential architecture that looks and functions like no other for clients looking to put down deep roots.
‘Our focus is single homes for those who want to live in the house for the rest of their lives and, in most cases, pass it on to the next generation,’ says Cole. ‘They’re invested so the approach to sustainability is firm. They’re coming to us with that from the beginning.'
To make its ambitions a built reality, the architect made Autodesk digital tools central to its design process: bolstering efficiency, creativity and collaboration.
Read the full article to learn how CplusC used technology to meet Welcome to the Jungle House’s ambitious sustainability goals.
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Take a tour of the Welcome to the Jungle House (video: 5:43min). Credits: CplusC Architects + Builders / Cinematography by Alexander Lee