The information in these guidelines is intended to assist people who are planning to rebuild dwellings impacted by bushfire to make informed choices in planning designing and commissioning their new dwelling. It may also be of relevance for people considering how to improve the resilience of existing structures to the impact of bushfire.
Bushfires are dramatic events and the process of rebuilding, where people choose to do so, is a significant undertaking. This is because, for most, the need to suddenly get a new house built is not on their radar. Different people will move forward at different times depending on their objectives and intentions.
These guidelines are designed to help you:
- understand the rebuilding process
- think about the sorts of building, design and other professional services that you are likely to need along the way, and
- to prompt thinking about how the rest of your site is landscaped or managed.
While focused on replacement or new building, these guidelines are also relevant and complementary to existing guidelines and advice on retrofitting buildings to improve their resilience. This includes the Country Fire Association (CFA) and Victorian Building Authority (VBA) guidelines to retrofit your home for better protection from a bushfire and guides on landscaping and plant selection.
Consider the options
Designing and constructing buildings to be more resilient to the impact of bushfires is an important priority as society adapts to the impacts of more frequent and more severe bushfires.
Key considerations in creating contemporary residential structures anywhere include:
- energy efficiency and future running costs
- overall liveability
- efficient use of resources
- minimising ongoing maintenance costs
- site suitability and land stability (geotechnical) requirements particularly on steep or unstable sites, as well as
- bushfire risk and resilience and potential impact from other natural hazards.
Maintaining natural environments and environmental are also important considerations. Having an open-minded approach can optimise how structures are sited, the design of a new structure, materials used to achieve benefits for bushfire resilience as well as energy efficiency, and importantly how costs can be minimised.
In general, a building designed with bushfire in mind that suits the site and any constraints will be more cost-effective to deliver compared to retrofitting a standard design and making it more fire-resilient.
Designing a new house to be energy efficient is very complementary to the objectives in designing a fire-resilient house. Adopting an open-minded approach, embracing sustainability principles in the design of the dwelling and working with the site constraints through the design process will deliver the best results in the long term.
After a fire, it may be tempting to try and recreate what existed before. In most cases, this is not practical and if the lost house was an older structure, it would most likely not have embraced contemporary sustainable design principles. It also may not have been built to the current construction standards that your new dwelling will be required to meet.
These guidelines set out general information to help inform decisions about rebuilding after a bushfire, or for new construction in a bushfire prone area. It does not provide standard designs or set new standards, rather it acknowledges that any design solution should reflect the site and its opportunities and constraints.
There is a broad range of existing guidelines and explanatory material in the public domain in relation to requirements for building in bushfire prone areas. These can be found via the links to key information sources at the end of this document.
This guide addresses:
- key phases in the planning and building process
- siting and general locational considerations
- the structure itself
- landscaping and other site treatments
- the planning permit process
- building permits
- case studies of representative buildings in different bushfire risk settings
- key links for relevant information.
Architect Nigel Bell spent six months working with the community at Marysville, Victoria, following the Black Saturday fires in 2009.
When you’ve lost everything, he says it’s natural to want to rebuild what you’ve just lost. But it’s not necessarily the best response.
“The people who replace them quickly tend to want to fill in that hole so they build a home almost the same as the one they lost,” he says. “But it’s usually people who take their time to rebuild who will build something different and often better.”
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