Toorak

This brand-new home in Toorak was designed to meet exceptionally high client expectations. Developed by Prestige by Simonds Family, and designed by FGR Architects, the luxury house offers premium amenities, comfort levels and air quality for its future occupants. Prestige engaged Mod Cons to deliver a heating and cooling system that would create the perfect thermal environment in every room at any time of the day and year. Architectural aesthetics were also of the utmost importance with a system that is near invisible to the eye.

With curving glass facades and a flat roof, the four-storey house provided construction and architectural constraints for the integration of heating, cooling and air purification. Mod Cons undertook sophisticated modelling to calculate the heat load due to the large expanses of glazing so that the occupants would not have to draw the blinds even on very hot days.

The AirSmart indoor environment system fitted with inverter fans and refrigerated cooling was installed in the limited roof space with ducting to every room in the house, including the gym, which is located on the far side of the seven-car basement garage, away from all other habitable spaces. This required 100 metres of ducting from the roof to the basement and through the double-skin construction along the garage to one discrete grille in the corner of the gym. “It’s a long way to go for one grille but the developer and future occupant would not expect anything less, and nor would we offer it,” says Mod Cons business development manager Brendan Grossman. “It works extremely well.”

The form of each air outlet is perfectly matched to the geometry of each room: round grilles complement curvatures and linear grilles align with straight walls. Mod Cons sourced white Wi-Fi thermostats to correspond with the interior finishes, and bathroom exhausts are integrated with heating and cooling grills in wet areas. This means there is no visible impact of the system with all equipment concealed within the structure and all grilles and thermostats maintaining the architectural integrity and customer expectations for the luxury house.