As Australia aims to improve access for all, the country’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) plans to provide SDA housing for 28,000 people with disabilities.
Realising that NDIS care providers were better equipped to focus on their expertise, the government invited the commercial property sector to conceive SDA standard designs to improve the dwellings, which have historically often felt more like hospitals than homes.
Sam Khalil, Managing Director of DPN Group, commented ‘we wanted to create a designer home that anybody would walk into and say, ‘I would love to have this as my home’, and not to be able to tell that it’s been built as a disabled-care home in any way and within three months, we had $200m expressions of interests (EOIs), we’ve already bought more land and there’s a pipeline of housing with a plan to build 1,500 homes in the next five years’.
In the Casa Capace homes, KNX controls the electrical doors, the lighting, blinds, TVs and HVAC, and even the height of the benches. It can also implement scenes, such as raising the blinds and switching on the lights in the morning or turning on the TV and dimming the lights in the evening.
Christian Schiemann, Market Development Manager, ABB Building Automation Australia and New ZealandThe first two dwellings opened in Sydney’s Oran Park.