Sara couldn’t find the right home for her dad. So she built it from scratch

When architect Sara Pearson went looking for a compact home close to shops and services for her dad, Allen, a retired cattle farmer and vet, most were old, too big and on large blocks.

They would have been “a mess” for her dad, said Pearson, who has long been an advocate for smaller homes. “He would’ve been cold, and never want to turn the heating on because it would cost too much money.”

Retrofitting was expensive, too, and she’d talked to many empty nesters rattling around in homes that were too big where maintenance had got out of hand.

“It would have been like wearing a suit that is too big for you. I couldn’t do that to Dad. I think we all overestimate the size of the space we need to live well in,” said Pearson, who splits her life and practice between Lismore and Sydney.

A unit wouldn’t work either. She describes her 78-year-old father as a “mountain goat” who likes “digging holes” [gardening] and being close to birds and nature.

Her solution was to build what she couldn’t find: a compact detached home, oriented to the sun, with views across the valley without interrupting neighbours’ outlooks.

Instead of using the entire block for one home, the usual practice despite a shortage of housing after Lismore’s 2022 record floods, Pearson and her father bought a 1250-square-metre hilly block.

She halved it horizontally to build two 113-square-metre well-insulated three-bedroom homes. It also gave them more bang for their block.

The project, Goonellabah Houses, is shortlisted for an award in the multi-residential category of the 2026 NSW Architecture Awards – winners will be announced on Thursday. It also won the 2026 NSW Regional Architecture Awards for Multiple Housing and the Small Project Architecture Award.

Doubling the usual density, each home is about half the size of the average new Australian home of about 230 square metres, according to a 20-year Bureau of Statistics analysis.

Going smaller with gentle density could also make a big difference to supply and reduce housing costs.

A Grattan Institute report found half of all residential-zoned blocks in Sydney are larger than 600 square metres. They were large enough to accommodate additional smaller homes, which were faster and cheaper to build than apartment blocks.

Grattan identified more than 400,000 sites in Greater Sydney where it would be commercially feasible to build developments up to three storeys if bans on gentle density (townhouses, duplexes and granny flats) were removed.

The Committee for Economic Development of Australia said housing supply would rise 9 per cent if one in four standalone homes in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth were turned into dual occupancies.

Most of the shortlisted projects for the awards are large multi-storey apartment blocks. Yet architects of smaller projects, such as Pearson and Phillip Arnold of Plus Minus Design, are increasing density one suburban block at a time.

Arnold chopped a Kingsford block backing on to the University of NSW in half, creating two long homes, each with a garage and a self-contained granny flat.

Because of its white facade, steps and levels that floated down the eight-metre fall of the hill, builders called Arnold’s project the Kingsford Acropolis.

Arnold said it increased the number of bedrooms on the site from three to 10.

To avoid the additional costs if he had built upwards, his solution was to spread the two homes across 24 levels, dropping the length of the block, connected by dozens of steps.

These sorts of projects increased supply and housing choice, Arnold said. “We’ve got a city that is growing in population and massively sprawling, so we need to address density but, at the moment, it is [mostly] addressed with apartment buildings.”

Pearson Architecture’s practice is mostly based in Sydney, and Sara had not planned to move to Lismore until the two homes were completed. “We realised we had built something that exceeded our expectations, and that rather than just renting it out … we wanted to live in it,” she said.

As for Allen, he is happy. “Nothing is out of my reach,” he said. “Just as important, I am literally in eye level … with plants and animals, and small birds. The views are superb, but the close physical contact with nature is better.”

Julie Power is a lay juror for the Australian Institute of Architects’ NSW Architecture Awards and served on the panel for multi-residential housing.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.