Sustainability Beyond the Labels
The word “sustainable” appears constantly in conversations about housing. It’s in project briefs, on websites, in casual exchanges with clients who want to do the right thing. The word has become a shorthand for something good, something responsible, though what it actually means seems to shift depending on who’s using it.
Sometimes it refers to solar panels. Sometimes to rainwater tanks. Other times to timber certification, recycled materials, or a particular brand of insulation. The word gets attached to individual decisions, discrete features that can be pointed to and counted. A house becomes sustainable by addition, by accumulating enough of the right elements.
That’s not how it works in practice.
When I’m working through the early stages of a project, sustainability isn’t a category or a checklist. It’s a set of questions that shape everything else. Where does the sun come from in winter? How does air move across this site in summer? What materials will perform well here over time, and what will demand constant maintenance? How does water behave when it rains heavily, and where should it go? What’s the embodied cost of what we’re building with, and where did it come from?
These questions don’t lead to features. They lead to decisions about orientation, about room placement, about which walls are solid and which are open, about whether thermal mass makes sense or whether lighter construction is better. They extend to material selection, not just for how something performs thermally, but for how it was made, how far it traveled, and what happens to it at the end of its life. The house begins to organize itself around these considerations, not in spite of them.
A building that works with its climate rather than against it doesn’t need as much mechanical intervention. Rooms that are positioned to catch winter sun and summer breezes stay comfortable without constant adjustment. But passive design alone doesn’t make a house sustainable. A well-oriented building can still be constructed from materials with high embodied energy, poor durability, or significant environmental cost. The work is in holding both concerns together: how a house performs over time, and what it cost to build in the first place.
Materials that age well and shed water cleanly don’t need replacing every decade. Timber that’s sourced responsibly lasts longer and stores carbon rather than releasing it. Concrete used strategically provides thermal mass without excess. Steel recycled and reused carries less environmental burden than new production. This isn’t virtue. It’s attention to how things actually work, and to what they cost beyond the invoice.
But the word has drifted away from that kind of thinking. It’s come to mean something you can add at the end, a layer of credentials that prove intent. The gap between the word and the work keeps widening.
How we build, what we build with, how much energy a house needs to stay livable over decades, these things have consequences. A house that requires constant heating and cooling, that leaks air, that ignores the climate it sits in, costs more to live in and more to maintain. Materials that degrade quickly or can’t be repaired add to that burden. The house places ongoing demands on the people living there and on the systems supporting it.
Calling something sustainable doesn’t make it so. The work is in the design itself, in how a building is thought through from the beginning. It’s in understanding the site, the climate, the way of living, and designing accordingly. It’s not about achieving a certification or meeting a standard, though those can be useful. It’s about making decisions that reduce effort, waste, and ongoing cost while creating spaces that work well over time.
A house that does this doesn’t need to announce it. It shows in how the rooms stay comfortable, in how little intervention is required, in how the building ages without falling apart. The sustainability, if we’re still using that word, is in how it performs day to day, year after year, not in how it’s described.
I’m not sure the word is helping us anymore. It’s become too broad, too easily attached to things that don’t deserve it. But the questions it should point toward, those remain. Every project still begins with the same considerations: climate, orientation, materials, durability, embodied cost, how a household will actually live. The work is to keep asking those questions seriously, whether or not we call it sustainable.
Sometimes the word gets in the way of the work. What matters is whether a house does what it should, for the people living in it, for as long as it stands.