Aviation Tour - Maps on www.bankleft.com

While waiting for paperwork, we have designed a house to build next year. It is a simple 120m2 pavilion with a flat white roof with wide eves, clerestory windows for natural ventilation plus insect screening and glass walls that fold open. Its flow is a combination of open plan living/kitchen/shaded outdoor deck, isolated rumpus and single bedrooms plus a separate study/master suite. By skewing it 90 degrees and placing it on the front half of the block, I hope to achieve one of my design aims of at least an oblique garden aspect from every room in the house. Rather than build an object in itself, we very much want the house to be unobtrusive and functional and to play to the advantage of the wonderful natural vegetation of the sub tropics. We have been investigating plant types (particularly edible ones) and looking at how we can phase the planting alongside construction to allow slower growing and sight screen plants to be established as soon as possible.

Best of all, we can construct it ourselves from simple standard components. The most significant problems at the moment (along side the ubiquitous and mundane funding and planning consent issues) are;

Acoustics - polished concrete floor, glass walls and exposed gal steel decking ceiling could end up nasty without some soft furnishings and some ceiling perforations to absorb and attenuate sound rather than reflecting it. Maybe in a play on the typical high energy solutions to design issues, we could just have a rack of active noise reducing headphones at the door.

Psychrometrics - I'd like a ground coupled floor slab via a heat rejection water pipe network but with humidity being a larger comfort issue than temperature on site, I'm keen to avoid condensation. I'd like to avoid traditional energy intense air conditioning in favour of natural ventilation from the bay breeze and this more passive ground coupling approach. I don't know if such systems have been used locally to date, I suspect that it is more of a central London commercial building approach.

Furniture Design - we would prefer to spend our furnishing budget on good quality wood rather than on someone else'd design and construction work so we are applying our DIY attitude to this too. The issue is that comfort might be tricky to achieve without multiple design iterations. We'll look into what works while in Scandinavia next month.

This is an early development sketch while we were working on the arrangement of the rooms around the courtyards that my two-overlapped-diamond design provides.

To allow us to camp away from the plane if necessary, Helen rigged this trailer to my bike. It will also act as a great fuel retrieval platform if we can't obtain AVGAS and need to fetch car petrol.

The economy class offering here at Bank Left Air;