Granny flats · Duplexes · Dual occupancy
Granny flats, duplexes and multi-dwelling development.
Secondary dwelling, dual occupancy and small multi-dwelling design for developers, investors and homeowners across Newcastle, Lake Macquarie, the Hunter and the Central Coast — documented by a building designer who has been doing exactly this work for twenty years.
Scope
The work this covers.
Granny flats and secondary dwellings
Granny flat plans designed to make a backyard earn its keep — as a rental, for family, or to add value ahead of a sale.
Duplexes and dual occupancy
Attached and detached dual occupancy, designed around what the block can realistically carry and how the two dwellings share it.
Subdivision-driven builds
The classic move: keep the existing house, put a new dwelling behind it. Site planning and documentation that supports the subdivision outcome you're after.
What the site will carry
Before anything gets drawn, you want a realistic read on yield: what fits, what parks, what drains, and what the constraints actually allow. That feasibility thinking comes first, so you're not paying for a scheme that was never going to work.
The right approval pathway
Whether a project suits complying development or needs a development application changes its timeline and its risk. Twenty years of this work means the pathway question gets asked — and answered — at the start, not discovered late.
Documentation that repeats
Development work runs on per-unit economics. Efficient, repeatable documentation is a selling point here: drawings builders can price cleanly, and a process that turns the next site around faster than the first.
Where it gets interesting
Multi-unit that actually performs.
“If you're doing multi-unit and you want it to actually perform — genuinely comfortable, cheap to run, not just scraping through compliance — that's the work I'll fight for.”
— Craig Blencowe. See what makes a great home — most of it costs less than you'd think at development scale.
Twenty years of this work
Granny flats, dual occupancies and unit developments have been bread-and-butter work across this practice and previous roles for two decades. It's high-volume, deadline-driven documentation — and doing it for that long teaches you what councils, certifiers and builders each need to see on the drawings.
Working with investors
If you're costing a site, the useful conversation is short: address, what you're hoping to put on it, and your timeline. You'll get a straight answer on whether it's worth taking further and what the design process would look like.