Oct 11, 2015: What’s Wrong With This Picture?

The Resort - Ad

The above is an ad that has been appearing regularly in our local newspaper. It describes a project home called “The Resort” with “absolutely everything your family home needs”. Apparently this “vision of elegance and grandeur… has features that will forever be a source of pleasure and happiness”. In other words, if you buy this wonderful house, you will be in a state of perpetual bliss for the rest of eternity. Sounds like heaven doesn’t it…. literally!

To me this seems like some fairly optimistic advertising even for a project home builder. But I am on a mission to change mainstream building practice in Australia so it’s important to me to try to understand what the average family wants in a home… apparently this is it.

After seeing this ad a few times I decided to visit the builder’s website and learn more about “The Resort” and wow, what a beauty it is! It features five bedrooms and five living areas… FIVE LIVING AREAS! It also has a study/guest bedroom, three and a half bathrooms and “3 or more “ garages. The website is not specific on the actual floor area of the home. It gives the dimensions as “30.2m x 21.35m” which is over 600sqm. However the layout is a U-shape and if you deduct for the courtyard in the middle the floor area seems to be around 400sqm. Here is the floor plan so you can get the full effect.

The Resort - floor plan

All I can say is, at 400sqm it certainly ought to have “absolutely everything your family home needs”. To put this into perspective, the two-bedroom Greeny Flat is 57sqm. That means “The Resort” is SEVEN TIMES the size of the Greeny Flat. The land the Greeny Flat is built on contains two houses and is around 750sqm in area so “The Resort” would only just fit on this entire property… that’s a lot of house! In fact, I think it explains what they mean by “Stunning Acreage Design”.

And that’s not the best of it… the most wonderful and magical thing of all is that, according to the ad, “The Resort” is also “energy efficient and environmentally sustainable”. See for yourself, it’s there in black and white so it must be true.

The Resort - text

Well, I’m sold… where do I sign up. The only thing left for me to do is to go and visit the display home in Renwick (not far from the Greeny Flat) and find out exactly how the layout of this glorious edifice “ensures energy efficiency and environmentally sustainable living”. It must be a one heck of a layout. While I’m there I’ll see if they can tell me what exactly is energy efficient and sustainable about this enormous monstrosity.

I can’t wait to hear what they have to say… I’ll keep you posted.

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