Merricks residence

Made to order
Designer Modscape
Location Merricks, VIC
Project type Prefabricated house
Cost $550,000

Photography Peter Glenane

Prebuilt modular houses

by Toby Horrocks
Strand-woven
bamboo flooring,
used throughout
the home, is dense
and hard wearing

Water Saving
• Bluescope Corrugated Zincalume
8800L rainwater tank

Passive Heating & Cooling

• Austral insulated panel R3.7
and Aircell R2.0

Active Heating
& Cooling

• Futura ceiling fans

Building
Materials

• Recycled blackbutt
timber from
Urban Salvage

• Embeltons strand-
woven bamboo
flooring

The Merricks house was delivered with 13

trucks and 25 workers; 13 hours later it was
fully installed, with services connected the next
day. The homeowners were delighted.
“We’d done big renovations before, and the
savings in time, effort and hassle with
prefabrication are amazing.”

Lighting
• Philips Lumiled LEDs

Paints & Finishes

• Berger Breath Easy low-VOC paints

62 63
 A few years ago, architecture firm Pleysier
Perkins came to Prebuilt with their “Mod”
design for a prefabricated house. Their five metre
wide by 16 metre long modules are the maximum
size you can fit on a wide-load truck without special
permission, and can be arranged in just about
any configuration. According to Prebuilt’s Melissa
Sydney, “they are like huge pieces of Lego”.
During the design phase, clients work with the
Prebuilt design team to develop a site-specific
64
design, after which the drafting team produce
plans. The owner of Prebuilt’s Merricks house is
a former employee of Prebuilt, so she was very
familiar with how it works. She says the whole
process took less than a year, including getting
planning approval for subdividing her land.
In her design, the Merricks homeowner chose
to minimise the use of steel and aluminium for
embodied energy reasons. “I went with all timber
window framing and timber footings,” she says.
The homeowner also selected her own finishes,
like the tiling around the fireplace and the recycled
in the walls, and every window is double glazed.
“We generally hit 6.5 stars,” says Melissa Sydney.
timber floor boards. Prebuilt now offer her design Even though the Merricks client installed an
as a standard floor plan. airconditioner last summer, “I didn’t use it once”.
The Mod has a steel deck under the
floor, but the rest of the structure is traditional
timber stud framing.
Because of the lightweight construction of their
modules, Prebuilt crank up the insulation – R1.1
Air-Cell in the floor, R3.1 insulation in the roof, R2.0
65
 Prebuilt Merricks
Designer Prebuilt
The
Millennium House
Location Merricks, VIC
Project type Prefabricated house
Cost $330,000

Photography John Gollings

Sustainable Keeping it simple
features
By Jenny Brown

Water Saving
•B iolytix waste water system (www.biolytix.com)
Comprises underground greywater
tank using a combination of charcoal
filters, netting, microbes and worms
to treat water. Piped to garden.

Passive Heating & Cooling

• CSR Bradford R4 Glasswool ceiling batts,
R2 wall batts, Aircell R1.5 underfloor insulation

• Shutters and
pergola for shade

Building
Materials
• Plantation silvertop
ash and Carter Holt
Harvey Shadowclad
external cladding
• Plantation pine framing

• Recycled blackbutt flooring

Glazing
• 4mm toughened double-glazed windows

Lighting
• CFL and LED

Active Heating
• Nectre 15 pedestal wood
heater (www.nectre.com)

OTHER
• Mega Anchor building foundation
system (www.mega-anchor.com.au)

66 67