Our approach to sustainability - Archer Design Studio

Written by: Erin Rogers

January 2026

Photography: Taylah Cunningham Photography

Our approach to sustainability

The word ‘sustainability’ can be thrown around excessively, used as an overarching term to imply the intent to do things better – ‘more sustainably’ - but without the deep interrogation into how or why, it can lose its meaning.

Evidently, when talking about sustainability, we believe it’s first important to highlight which aspect of the multi-faceted realm of ‘sustainability’ is being interrogated and prioritised. There are many avenues of which to approach what is currently a trending word: environmental, social, energy, carbon, cultural, heritage, economic, material, resource etc. Many of these avenues can run in parallel however, some may also be contradictory. For example, a system or product can be produced as carbon neutral, but if it’s not economical to produce or financially viable to implement or maintain in practice, is it still sustainable?

We recognize that the building and construction industry in all areas from manufacturing through to construction contributes massively to national and global energy consumption and waste generation. Additionally, we are conscious of the ongoing energy consumption and resources that are used to keep our buildings comfortable and in working condition over their lifecycle, inevitably contributing to future emissions. We also recognise the impacts that the buildings we create have on the urban fabric of which it is integrated and the way in which the spaces we form can enhance or reflect the life of its occupants.

In our approach to sustainability, we work to design buildings and places that are not just beautiful, functional and qualitative but that are also environmentally and socially responsible. This means we look to leave the places in which we work better than we found them, for the ecology of the site, for the environment we inhabit, for the communities we interface and for the people that will become the future inhabitants. In other words, we want to enhance the relationship between people and their places. We are thoughtful and intentional in the way we design, conscious of the flow on impacts of the decisions we make and the work we produce. We see each project as a new learning opportunity, approaching everything with the intention to implement and grow upon the lessons we have collected to constantly evolve and refine to achieve better outcomes for each project.

We hold principles of sustainability at the heart of what we do and although the formalisation and prioritisation vary within every project, the foundational values we embed can be summarised into our core principles: Smaller footprint, better quality. Living with the climate. Enduring architecture. Design with context.

These principles are often innately interlinked, each value enhancing the others, creating a cohesive system evidencing what we believe good design to be.

Small footprint, better quality

We counter the idea that bigger is better. We see many people defaulting to designing for on-paper real estate ‘value’, rather than designing functional, qualitative and enduring buildings and spaces.

Australia has some of the largest homes in the world and we see the cycle of consumerism, throw away culture and trends has become embedded in not only the way we approach consumable items but also the buildings we inhabit. In the words of Jo Bastian of Bastian Architecture, we treat our buildings like IKEA: we tend to over-generalise and produce generic outcomes that are poor quality in high volume, an outcome that typically favours the developer not the occupant.

To combat this trend of excessiveness and wastefulness, we side with the idea of ‘enough’ and ‘quality over quantity’. In this way, it is not a matter of going without but an opportunity to be more thoughtful and intentional to create higher value spaces. This approach lets us move away from providing rooms for the purpose of utility and instead providing spaces that have embedded value, create joy, cognitive restoration and calm.

When we speak of quality we refer to both the quality of the construction and the quality of the spaces or the way they feel when we inhabit them. When investing in quality construction, what is achieved is long-lasting buildings and fewer ongoing costs.

The way in which we move through the design process is to first rationalise the brief, looking more at what the building needs to achieve, which then informs how it can be organised. In our work we reference the idea put forward by TRIAS: what can be gained by taking something away. For example, reducing footprint, scale or retreating the built form from a block boundary, can result in more light, improved passive ventilation and greater perceived space to adjoining landscapes.

We use borrowed, flexible, adaptable, shared or sometimes programmatically undefined spaces to ensure that people can overlay their unique way of living into a building and to ensure that no space is static or underutilised.

Living with the climate

We look to reduce our buildings lifetime energy use through considered, site specific design. In our work, this means harnessing passive design principles to naturally work with seasonal rhythms and the innate conditions of the site.

Passive design principles are timeless, tried and tested methods refined through years of vernacular development and learning. Typically, these principles work to harness climate and landscape to heat, cool or regulate our buildings temperature and air quality, creating healthier, more responsive homes and buildings. Our projects engage with these principles through considering orientation, floor plan organisation, scale, volume, air circulation, insulation, thermal mass, window placement, water harvesting, materiality and interaction with landscape.

We work to make our buildings as self-regulating as possible before engaging with artificial intervention, meaning people are inevitably more aware and connected to their environments and seasons. This is as simple as using window placement to capture sun in winter, creating warm and cosy corners to occupy throughout the day and developing a high-performance building envelope to maintain warmth through the night. In summer, these same windows are shaded from direct sun and operable in ways that inhale and cross ventilate cooling breezes to purge warm air during a cool night. In this way we can naturally maintain comfortable buildings resulting in less energy consumption, or at the very least, smarter energy consumption.

We celebrate the refined simplicity of letting buildings breath and adapt over creating finitely controlled environments believing that the option to counteract bad design choices with artificial interventions disengages us from our place. The reality of building ‘sustainably’ can quickly become arbitrary or even counterintuitively unsustainable when layers of complex systems are relied upon to allow a building to function in a state of perfection. We use artificial intervention sparingly and efficiently, always relying on passive design principles first.

Enduring architecture

An enduring building is one that is both built well with solid foundations and robust materials, and one that is cherished, well looked after and valued for more than just the sum of its parts. We often see when buildings and places hold memory and attachment, they are valued are cared for in a way that lengthens the life of the building.

In our work we focus on understanding how a space can influence a person's actions, mood or the way they live and connect. We seek to create calming and restorative spaces that allow cognitive restoration through expressing honesty and simplicity of form and materiality. For us, homes are not just places of intrinsic necessity (shelter and warmth) but a canvas of which people can orchestrate their lives so we also focus on how a building can absorb and reflect the life and personalities of its occupants.

Designing with context

Particularly in an urban setting, the implications of what we build, including scale and quality, greatly affects the composition of the street and neighbourhood of which it is integrated. The forming of a private space (buildings and dwellings) is to inevitably form the public space (streets and paths), and all the perceived or actual layers in between. In our work we look to sympathetically respond to our neighbours, streets and suburbs to be able to interface with communities in a way that benefits each.

We believe the practical considerations of overshadowing, solar access and privacy to neighbours don’t need to be by the sacrifice of the functionality or liveability of the proposed dwelling/s. Reducing footprint, scale or retreating from a block boundary, for example, can result in more light, improved passive ventilation and greater perceived space to adjoining landscapes as well as allowing more light and privacy to neighbours and adjoining public spaces.

When looking internally within a site we prefer to keep significant trees, disturb the land as little as possible and maintain, repair, reestablish or restore existing buildings over defaulting to clearing and starting a new. As implied in the well-known phrase: the greenest building is the one that’s already built, we can often be more economical and environmentally responsible by improving on and maintaining existing buildings, retaining their embodied carbon, reducing construction waste, build cost and emissions.

We believe some of the most successful projects are renovations, restorations and retrofits seeing many buildings as formalised or unformalized heritage. In our work we look to genuinely respond to and work with existing buildings, enhancing the ingrained stories and value by extracting, analysing or reimagining them. Where, in some cases, this is not feasible, we look to recycle the materials or reengage with the foundations or building footprint.