Sustainable Homes — Garden Design in Fitzroy, VIC

We approached SHM initially with the view to renovate our charming but very tired and very wonky weatherboard house. SHM undertook a thorough assessment of the house and undertook a comprehensive comparison of a renovation vs rebuild; taking into consideration budget, building challenges and overall performance of the house. We ended up taking the rebuild path and are so happy with our finished home. Every stage of the process was handled with professionalism, transparency and wonderful communication. We are thrilled to be in an energy efficient and beautifully constructed house, delivered on time and within budget. Thank you to all the team at SHM!

Feb 2026

SHM renovated our 50s weatherboard house, transforming it into a modern family home. We couldn't speak more highly of working with SHM and the home they built for us. The whole team was excellent to deal with, always responsive, transparent with pricing and timelines, and the quality of their work, as well as their suppliers, was excellent. They delivered our house on time and kept to budget. They also kept an astonishingly clean building site! Thanks Toby, Mike and everyone at SHM - genuinely a pleasure working with you.

Sept 2025

SHM renovated our 1920s Californian Bungalow (with a 1980s extension) into a beautiful family home for 2020s+. We have achieved a 7 star NATHERS rating while maintaining the original façade and roof. ReUse was important to us and we kept the existing doors (they needed a facelift) and bath and were able to use reclaimed timber for the floor boards. The windows are double glazed and HUGE, letting in lovely natural light. The delivery of work is of a high quality and Toby (PM) kept the teams on track and to standard. The different trades that worked on the house have delivered both high quality and helped us to minimise our environmental impact. The design nailed our desire for family living with teenagers, for open plan and retaining our garden aspect and storage. The SHM team at all stages were lovely to deal with, knowledgeable and efficient.

Nov 2023

We had SHM carry out a major renovation on our 1960s double brick home which they both designed and built. We are absolutely delighted with the quality of their work: we now have a lovely home that looks super cool, uses less energy to run and works so much better for family life. The folks at SHM are genuinely invested in sustainability, take great pride in their work and are consummate professionals at every stage of both the designing and building. Everybody we dealt with at SHM had impeccable vibes and was great at their job but in particular our site manager Toby and lead carpenter Todd really went above and beyond to make our new house wonderful.

Sept 2023

We used SHM & dealt with Simon however the project was managed mostly by Nigel (but we also had a few site managers). Project was managed unsatisfactorily with a lot of their work requiring rework or repairs (e.g. concrete slab, rewiring due to incorrect phase upgrade, plumbing, insulation, floor boards, plaster, tiling, steel work etc). A junior apprentice completed the majority of defective work unsupervised, resulting in further delays and rework. SHM missed the completion date by over 260 days, we only received a written notice of extensions for 68 of those days. Their variations to our fixed price contract caused the project to exceed the budget by over 23%, this overrun was a direct result of SHM's inability to accurately estimate work. Provisions were low balled (e.g. steel $4300 off, where quantity was specified in the plans and engineering) and activity that should have been identified at contract stage was omitted (e.g. drainage, slab for under utilities, upgrade of power). We were forced to remove work like the build of our deck and pergola because we couldn't afford to complete it with all these "cost surprises". We were misled to believe work was completed when it wasn’t in order to trick us into making progress payments. On various occasions they attempted to avoid responsibility for defective work. One example: they refused to do a proper inspection of a serious leak that was warping our floor boards, causing mould to grow, rotting our plaster, ruining our skirting and staining our expensive Pandomo floors. It was only once we paid $2,000 for an independent inspector ourselves to validate who was at fault and after we informed them we were seeking legal advice, did they decide to do a proper investigation and eventually fix it. The project felt like a constant battle to get things done the right way but what was most disappointing for us was that they were not experts in building sustainably as their name would suggest. We paid what we think are premium margins (23% of the build cost) for this particular expertise as we are very passionate about sustainability. Simon said to me in an email "We will never say we know everything about sustainability, if we were to use contractors that are 'so called' green, you would be paying alot more for what you are getting. Our aim is to specialize in building sustainable homes, that have been documented that way from the beginning. We rely solely on correct documentation and have trades that are able to carry out works in accordance with that”. This, in my opinion, makes them a regular builder NOT a sustainable builder. There was a lot of waste, trades did not separate waste to allow for recycling, they did not use sustainable trades, did not use eco materials & they had little understanding of the sustainable features of our home. Suffice to say, we will never use them again and do not recommend them. I have provided photos where I remembered to take them. Also I would not trust their positive reviews online, two of their "five-star" Facebook reviews are from their own staff who I dealt with during our project.

Nov 2017