Explore the home
Climb to the bathroom, roll the bed away, open the fridge and switch from day to evening. About 20 MB.
A bathroom on a raised floor, a bed that rolls in beneath it, 3.6 m ceilings and full-height doors onto the deck. Walk through it in 3D, see everything in it, and follow how it got from the first sketches to here.
Small homes live or die on the layout. This one lifts the bathroom onto a raised floor and rolls the bed in underneath it, so the floor you would normally give to a bedroom stays living space all day. The height does the rest: with 3.6 m to the ceiling and a skylight over the lounge, 41.36 m² feels a good deal bigger than it reads on paper.
Source: Hand-drawn plan, elevations and section, 25 September 2026, with the changes made since.
Nine steps, oldest first. The first eight follow the original design, from the architect's sheets to a fly-over of a real street. The ninth is a new layout, and it is the walkthrough at the top of this page.
It started where every home starts, with an architect and a scale ruler. Two floor plans, one for the living level and one for the kitchen, which sits on a platform 1.2 m above it. Then elevations, and a long section that shows how the pieces stack.
Every figure on this page comes off these sheets. The 3D model had to match them, not the other way round.
Drawings by AREI Designs.
The same set carries an exploded view: roof lifted off, kitchen level floating above the living level, so you can see how the platform sits over the bed stow. The red block is the kitchen.
Drawings by AREI Designs.
Next came views taken inside the architect's sketch model. Grey boxes, no finishes, but for the first time you could stand on the deck and look in, or hover over the roofline and see the whole floor at once.
It is also where the curved stair shows its worth. It turns the corner onto the platform, so it stays tucked beside the bed stow instead of reaching into the living room.
Then the whole home was rebuilt in Blender, the open-source 3D modelling software, to the drawings' dimensions: 4.68 m wide, 8.88 m long, 3.6 m to the ceiling, with the deck out front.
Checking it against the plans mattered. The first version put bar stools at the kitchen counter, which sits 1.2 m off the living floor. Nobody would have lasted long on those. The stools went, and the counter now runs along the platform edge with the cook behind it, just as the section shows.
A model only starts to feel like a home once the surfaces are real. Oak floorboards went down, the walls picked up textured plaster, and the counter got a marble top. The stair and platform were matched to the plans step by step.
The latest pass furnishes it properly, down to how the throw falls across the bed. The kitchen, laundry and bathroom were rebuilt against the drawings first, so the fridge, the washer and the shower are the size the plans give them. The look is one styling concept: light, coastal and easy to live with. The layout underneath it is the design.
Then the Blender scene came to the web. The first attempt put a slimmed-down copy of the model on the page to spin around. It loaded on a phone, but it looked like a video game. So it made way for a tour of full-quality 360° renders. You could stand on the deck, in the living room, at the foot of the bed, in the kitchen or in the bathroom, and look anywhere you liked. At the bed, one button rolled the bed in under the kitchen platform. That one move was the whole idea of the design.
A floor plan shows how a home works. It can't show how it sits on a street, so we flew over one. The film starts at the Harbour Bridge, drops onto a vacant block in Lilyfield and builds two of these homes on it, panel by panel, with a garage under each. Then it climbs over the top and turns to face Iron Cove.
The street did most of the design work. It falls about two metres along the frontage, so the garages open at footpath level and the two homes step down with the road. This is a design study, not a project for sale.
Then the layout changed. A new set arrived, drawn by hand on graph paper: a plan, three elevations and a cross section. The big idea survived, a bed that rolls away under a raised floor, but almost everything around it moved. The bathroom now sits up on the platform, 1.2 m off the floor, and the bed rolls in beneath it. The kitchen comes down to the living floor as a galley, and the washer and dryer sit side by side on a shelf you reach from the bathroom.
Hand drawings rarely agree with themselves to the millimetre, so before anything was built the plan, the elevations and the section were checked against each other, and every disagreement was listed and decided rather than averaged. A few things were added along the way. The lounge gained a bigger skylight ringed by four downlights and a high window over the TV, the front opened up with full-height stacking doors onto a covered deck, and the galley got a tall sash window at its end. The shower has a niche, every stair tread has an LED tucked under its lip, and an LED under the plant ledge lands on the pillows when the bed is out.
The 3D is different this time too. It is not a tour of fixed pictures. It is the Blender model itself, with its real materials and its light worked out in advance, for a sunny day and for the evening, the way the design software renders a finished image. So it is sharp from the first step, wherever you walk. It is dressed the way a finished home would be photographed, down to the towels on the bathroom shelves and the cake in the fridge. And it keeps one question open: over the laundry, the ceiling can stay at 3.6 m as drawn or drop to 2.8 m, and you can switch between the two.
The design as it stands, grouped by where things sit in the home. The list grows as the design firms up.
Join the community and we will keep you posted as the design develops, along with the rest of what we are building.
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