Five of most innovative community housing developers in 2021
LONDON: Over the next 5 days, an innovative community housing developer will be profiled.
Today the focus is on Nightingale Housing.
Nightingale Housing
Living simply is at the heart of all that Nightingale Housing does.
Borne out of a desire to see more socially, financially and environmentally sustainable housing in Melbourne, Breathe Architecture partnered with Small Giants to build The Commons. The appetite for this groundbreaking project was unprecedented, and led to the formation of Nightingale Housing.
Nightingale Housing founder Jeremy McLeod said the business hinged on a desire to “build less, give more”.
“When we asked people what they need in a home, they said space, light, an outlook, windows that open, really simple things,” McLeod said.
“We believe that homes should be built for people, not profit.”
Dwellings are sold “at cost”, which factors in the price of procurement, design, management and construction, with no profit margin added. They are sold with a caveat that cost savings be passed on to the next owners.
Nightingale Housing is working to address the barriers to accessing quality sustainable housing, and pre-allocates 20 per cent of dwellings to Community Housing Providers who offer affordable long-term leases to vulnerable members of the community. It also allocates a further 20 per cent to “key community contributors”.
“We deliver well-built, sustainable homes that are minimal and honest. We take out things such as second bathrooms, individual laundries and basement carparks to reduce the cost of construction and ongoing maintenance,” a spokesman said.
“Instead we include things that are important for the creation of healthy, comfortable, sustainable homes such as double glazing, excellent insulation and 100 per cent certified green power.
We believe it is important that Nightingale buildings are available to a genuine cross-section of society.”
Incorporating insulation, passive ventilation, solar shading and thermal modelling reduces the reliance on heating and cooling in their buildings, while recycled products are being used in pre-cast panels in projects under construction.
They also harvest rainwater and use green facades to help reduce the urban heat island effect. Nightingale is also adopting life cycle analysis and embodied carbon in future projects.
Nightingale Bowden is its first project in South Australia, in a former manufacturing and industrial area. The South Australian government is supporting the development of Bowden into a sustainable, walkable, transit-oriented medium-density neighbourhood that is financially accessible for Adelaide’s growing population.
The five-storey building in the 16ha urban regeneration precinct will contain 34 apartments providing a mix of affordable housing, private homes for sale and specialist disability accommodation, on the city’s fringe.
A Nightingale spokesman said it wanted to take the Nightingale model to as many places as possible but they could only develop sites that were financially viable.
“There is a sweet spot where density and land cost allows a project to deliver sustainable high-quality housing below market price,” he said.
“This is not a phase—medium-rise development has been practiced sustainably across many of the great cities of the world.
We believe it can be replicated in areas that have access to good infrastructure and community.”
Nightingale has designs on further developments in Brunswick, to be announced soon, and are anticipating the completion of Nightingale Village, Anstey and Ballarat as early as the end of this year.
