Love Shack in Bondi Reimagines Material Reuse and Small-Scale Functionality.

Nothing makes me want to do a little happy dance like projects that challenge convention, and it’s why this little project has stolen my heart. Second Edition‘s Love Shack is a prototype for material reuse and design for disassembly (DfD) that delivers small-scale functionality with remarkable resource efficiency.

Perched on a triangular corner site, this architectural chameleon transforms from bedroom to living room to office quicker than you can say “sustainable design.” It’s a flexible extension to Julia and Will Dangar’s family home in Bondi that’s as clever as it is beautiful. The facade facing the main house features operable solid doors that, when closed, offer all the privacy you need, and when thrown open, make the pavilion feel like it’s giving the backyard (by Dangar Barin Smith) a big warm hug. Those highlight windows aren’t just pretty faces either—they’re hard at work providing natural ventilation year-round and bathing the space in even indirect light.

The project’s uncompromising commitment to waste minimisation is remarkable. Second Edition embraced a 1.2m grid and 2.1m datum derived from standard sheet sizes as the base logic for the plan and elevations. It’s like watching design mathematics in action, and I’m here for every calculation.

Bismarck House in Sydney's Bondi by Andrew Burges Architects.

Andrew Burges acknowledges the semi-detached house is a typology he has been critical of in the past—for its shotgun corridor, compromised privacy and generally poor amenity—so he looked for bigger connections to a sense of place for Bismarck House.

The construction story is where things get interesting. Robert Plumb began with concrete over pour dry placed footings, with one placed at every grid intersection to allow flexibility in timber member sizes. The timber joists and beams were procured from second-hand marketplaces and left rough as found. No embodied carbon from transport and re-milling here—no, sir!

The transformation story of local waste materials into high-quality surfaces is equally noteworthy. The external render, developed in collaboration with Lusso Venetian renderer, incorporates locally salvaged and crushed marble. Inside, timber lining boards were rescued from tallowwood flooring in a Sydney home that was about to meet the wrecking ball. A deconstruction specialist (yes, that’s a real job, and I’m obsessed) carefully lifted the floorboards, which carpenters then refinished for a new life as wall lining. Even the light fixtures were made from the off-cuts. If that’s not circular economy perfection, I don’t know what is.

The trapezoidal column houses all services in the irregular bathroom space, creating programmatic delineation within the confined area. The joinery deserves its own round of applause—designed as loose furniture that can be removed with minimal fuss if the clients need change. Made by Cranbrook Workshop & AAH using leftover single sheets of oak and oregon veneer, it’s the furniture equivalent of “waste not, want not”.

Now for a reality check. Despite the lower upfront cost of some salvaged materials, this project would have been more cost-effective using standard construction methods and virgin materials. Our industry’s infrastructure is still frustratingly geared toward linear building processes, making designs with salvaged materials more time-intensive and labour-costly. That’s precisely why projects like the Love Shack are so important, as they push boundaries and eventually reshape industry norms.

From crushed marble waste in the facade render to salvaged tallowwood for internal wall linings, recycled timber for just about everything structural, and even wall lining made from Swiss Pearl packing sheets—this project is a poster child for material reincarnation.

Ultimately, the Love Shack is a manifesto that proves sustainable design can be innovative and pretty hot too when approached with creativity and purpose (and someone willing to invest time and money in it). It serves as a sliver of hope for what’s possible for the future of design and architecture.

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[Images courtesy of Second Edition. Styling & furnishings by Design Daily. Photography by Hamish McIntosh. Video by Tommy Devy.]