Sustainable House Day is an event from Renew that provides the opportunity to explore some of Australia’s most inspiring homes, and learn from the people who designed them, built them, and live in them.

Following a day of open-home tours around the country on Sunday 4 May 2025, a month of webinars offer a deep dive into a range of sustainability topics. Australia's best architects, designers, tradespeople and experts will offer guidance, and homeowners will offer first hand experience. If you're considering a sustainable build or renovation, this series is for you, with lots of time for Q&A.

Tickets

You can book this webinar independently, or grab a Webinar Series Pass to attend all 8 webinars at a discounted price. Members of Renew receive a further discount on Webinar Series passes. Feel free to grab a membership or subscription to Renew or Sanctuary magazine before you book to access the discount code!

Some local councils have partnered with Sustainable House Day and are offering a 50% discount on the Webinar Series Pass to their residents only. Participating councils include; Bass Coast Shire, City of Boroondara, City of Kingston, Manningham City, Merri-bek City, Mitchell Shire, Mornington Peninsula Council, City of Newcastle, City of Port Phillip, City of Stonnington, Willoughby City Council, and City of Yarra.

Webinar 4: Retrofitting for Resilience: Preparing Your Home for Fires, Storms, and Floods

Description

Learn how to retrofit your home for resilience so that your home is more resilient to extreme weather events like fires, storms, and floods, using practical strategies from our Green Rebuild Toolkit.

Featuring

Sasha Mainsbridge, Mullum Cares

Sasha’a Mullumbimby home only flooded with 15 cm of river water in February 2022 but that was all it took for her kitchen and bathroom to be deemed unrepairable and the estimate was that it would take 12-18 months for her home to be livable again and her insurer refused to do anything other than rebuild it back to its preflood specs. Years working on climate change mitigation meant she knew to call Renew to ask for help. We put her onto James Davidson from JDA Co. the countries leading architects for resilience, who supported Sasha and her organisation, Mullum Cares Inc., to design and deliver a localised Rebuild Flood Resilient Information and coaching service. While Sasha rebuilt her own home to be flood resilient she supported her friends and neighbours to do so as well. When the next major flood impacts her home Sasha will remove the 300mm skirting boards and the kitchen cabinets for cleaning, hose out the mud, turn all the ceiling fans on full speed and set the two reverse cycle units to dehumidify and expects to be back to normal within a week. One week versus 12-24 months.

Nigel Bell, ECOdesign Architects

Nigel is principal of ECOdesign Architects, working for 40 years in the most bushfire-prone Blue Mountains, outside of Sydney. From sustainability involvement and practice from the 1990’s onwards (including Churchill Fellowship and Al Gore’s ’Climate Reality’ training), this morphed into his becoming a professional leader in bushfire planning, design and construction over the last 20 years. This included producing educational materials for the community TAFE and Universities, representing architects on Australian Standards and the ‘bushfire’ Royal Commission (2020) as well as multiple webinars and research projects, including the Green Rebuild Toolkit. The 2023-24 ‘Beyond BAL – finding Australia’s most bushfire resilient homes’ for RENEW involved assessing sustainability and resilience across our climate zones – a challenging issue for bushfires, floods, storm and tempest that we’ll be discussing within this webinar.

Sara Wilkinson, UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY SYDNEY

Sara is a chartered building surveyor who first came across green buildings in 1988 as a practitioner in London. Her work included retrofitting and adaptive reuse of existing commercial and residential buildings. Her work on green building prompted her to start a research journey, which continues today, exploring sustainability in the built environment and how we can transition. She started teaching ‘environmental building practice’ in 1992 in
Sheffield has taught and researched the topic ever since. Sara has, and does, work with property and built environment professionals, horticultural scientists, bio engineers, mental health practitioners, planners, architects, business and accounting professionals on projects seeking real world solutions to deliver sustainable healthy environments.

Hosted by

Dick Clarke, Renew

Dick is principal of Envirotecture and is an Accredited Building Designer with 40 years experience. He focuses exclusively on ecologically sustainable and culturally appropriate buildings, as well as sustainable design in vehicles and vessels, and has received many Design Awards. He is Director of Sustainability and past President of the NSW Chapter of Building Designers Association of Australia (BDAA). He is a past President and Board Member of the Association of Building Sustainability Assessors (ABSA). Dick currently sits on the Australian Sustainable Built Environment Council (ASBEC), the peak body representing industries committed to a sustainable built environment. He has been design director of many hundreds of projects over 40 years, with sustainability as the major driver over that whole period (with the ever-changing understanding of what sustainability is), and his work has covered a wide variety of project sizes and types. Dick has edited the sought after book for designers, builders and home-owners; ‘How to Rethink Building Materials’.

Important Information

Please note that this session will be recorded and sent out to registered participants.
Each webinar will take place on Zoom. If you need to download Zoom, you can do so here.
You will receive the link to attend the sessions the day before each event.
Renew is a small not for profit organisation that needs to raise money from ticket sales to cover the costs of hosting this event.

Terms and Conditions

By purchasing a ticket, visitors agree to comply with the event terms and conditions to ensure a safe, respectful, and enjoyable experience for all attendees.

Our Sponsors

Sustainable House Day wouldn't be possible without our amazing sponsors, we are so grateful for their support. You can learn about our sponsors here.

Pictured here is Elemental House, a SHD2025 featured house. Photo by Marnie Hawson.

Contact the host of 2025 SHD Webinar: Retrofitting for Resilience: Preparing Your Home for Fires, Storms, and Floods