About this event

Sustainable Living Festival 2024 Housing is responsible for 10% of our national emissions and in 2023 we Australians spent over $1billion per month on renovations. Since the building stock of today will be here for the next half century, we need innovative, collaborative and regenerative models to meet our climate ambitions and make sure our 10 million existing homes are healthy, affordable, resilient climate solutions: a renovation wave to reset and repair.

Enter Dr  Laura Ryan  who, with her team, has spent the last 4 years, taking her 2-bedroom, semi-detached worker’s cottage on 104m2 in Sydney’s Inner West, and transforming it into a sustainable, fully off-grid home, documenting the whole project so anyone can copy it. Using a combination of Passivehaus building principles, off-grid waste, water, and solar solutions with sustainable interior design Laura has set a clear combination of goals for the project:

• No heating or cooling systems to be installed in the home, but the house has to be warm in winter and cool in summer

• The electricity and water systems need to be self sufficient

• To salvage as much of the existing property as possible for re-use in the new build

• The house must look, feel and function like a “normal house”

  . The inhabitants should not have to make liveability sacrifices.

• Only sustainably sourced materials are to be used, e.g., there is no concrete. Through this transformation, the team aim to:

• Provide a free step-by-step guide for anyone wanting to renovate sustainably in urban areas

• Demonstrate that a sustainable home can be inner-city cool and doesn’t have to look like a hippy log cabin

• Document all the costs, mistakes and successes – She’ll make the mistakes so you don’t have to

• Minimise costs – sustainable living should be accessible to everyone!

This “ImPossible” journey is not yet over and Laura is here to share her updates, experiences and knowledge with you! Joining us for this case study deep dive is John Caley, veteran sustainability consultant working with Laura on her off-grid water system ambitions. John is the owner of  Ecological Design  a sustainabilty consultancy offering assessment, advice and design services for sustainable residential renovations and builds since 2004. He specialises in rainwater harvesting, thermal performance, energy audits – all the good stuff. Evitat has been collaborating with Laura for over two years now and her renovation journey continues to inspire the Evitat team to take a fresh look at how we can empower conscious renovators with clever goals before they start speaking to professionals, suppliers and tradespeople. Projects like Laura’s help bolster our ambitions to diversify the home improvement market supply through innovations and healthier, circular, low-impact product and service choices and we are very much looking forward to catching up with Laura and diuscussing her renovation progress to date, including challenges, and how the Evitat Logbook can help with goals settings and having an impactful outcome that is good for you health, wealth and the planet. Hosted by  Simone Schenkel , Passive House expert and designer from Gruen Eco Design and  Sonja Markovic , CEO and Co-founder of Evitat. This will be a 90 minute session including half an hour of Q&A with our guests at the end. This session will be recorded. Event partner of the National Sustainable Living Festival 2024

Panelists

Dr Laura RyanRenovator, The Impossible House

John CaleySustainability Consultant - Ecological Design

Simone SchenkelGruen Design Studio, Certified Passive House Designer

Sonja MarkovicCEO and Co-founder at Evitat