Land to Build: Slope and orientation ↓
Choosing the right piece of earth to build your dream home can be a great experience, especially if you understand what you should look for.
Our land guide and checklist are designed to help you identify some of the pitfalls, opportunities and resources available when buying land, more specifically, to ensure it is suitable for building your desired home within budget.
These excerpts from the guide explore the considerations that should be made to slope and orientation when looking to buy your new home site.
A sloping site can be a positive factor for a project, providing the opportunity for views, breezes and an interesting building form and layout. On the flip side, sloping sites will add to the cost of building your home and the steeper the site, the more cost it inevitably adds. When assessing the site, you should consider the following:
The severity of the slope — is it relatively level or steeply sloping?
Does the block rise from the road or fall away?
What type of home do you want, i.e., a slab on the ground or a house on posts?
Sloping sites are a reality of living in South East Queensland, and with the correct planning and design considerations, they can always be maximised. You should avoid thinking that you will be able to build at the same rate of construction on a sloping site as on a flat site.
The best homes are designed to maximise a site’s orientation. While traditionally, a northern or north-eastern orientation will provide an optimal solar path across the site, many more considerations and opportunities may be available on sites with non-northern orientation.
Embracing the specific orientation and site opportunities means that a home can be designed to maximise these factors while minimising any negative impacts attributed to sub-optimal orientation. Simply put, the reality is that not all sites face north, but that doesn’t mean you can’t build something great.
