Gruen Eco Design

Thanks Simone and team for helping us build our dream home. I’m glad we met you and got me into Passivhaus. I left the design in your capable hands and we got the goods we were looking for. Wunderbar!

Wonderful personalised eco-friendly design. We love our new passive house!

3 years ago we purchased a little beautiful heritage listed 2 bedroom cottage in the Eastern suburb.Since then we embarked on a ambitious journey to turn this 2 bedroom little cottage into a spacious 4 bedrooms, 1 study and 3 bathrooms house. We wanted the house to be perfect in every way, modern and yet traditional. We wanted to keep all the beautiful heritage features of the original cottage and convert the house into a highly energy efficient, bright and airy home with lots of natural light streaming through in winter. Needless to say to achieve what we want was not an easy exercise. There were quite a number of challenges that we needed to overcome as part of the design process e.g. restrictions from council (heritage and significant landscape overlay), land size, position of existing cottage which is right in the middle of the property, existing vegetation, budget etc. The whole process was quite daunting and we would have no idea where to even start if it wasn't for Simone from Gruen Eco Design who's guided us through the whole process.Our dealings with Simone to put it simply, was AMAZING! As a director, owner, architect of Gruen Eco Design with lots of architecture experience from Germany, Simone is very knowledgable and creative. Despite the complexity of our build and all the restrictions and challenges we faced, Simone managed to design the extension that ticked all the boxes for us and approved by the rather strict council!What impressed me even more was Simone's passion for energy efficiency and creating a home that is spacious, bright and warm in winter, cool in summer. Simone isn't about spending big and building big. Simone's is all about building to the perfect size (without being overly massive resulting in waste of $ and space) that fits the need of a family and still feeling roomy and spacious. Simone is all about clever use of space that suits the budget and adding on the additional architecture character (not just designing a box).We have lived in this house for 6 months now and we are loving it. House is warm, bright, airy, beautiful and is full of character. We can't recommend Gruen Eco Design enough and are forever grateful for the work Simone has done which helped us achieve our dream.

Mellissa was very informative, knowledgeable and extremely helpful. If you are looking for a eco-friendly or a high performance house I would recommend you give Gruen Eco design a call.

Gruen provided a design package for our renovation/extension. We were confident going with Gruen after our first meeting with the Director and owner. However, sadly our overall experience was poor. We got hand balled to a junior who made a litany of basic design mistakes, to the point where we lost our confidence in Gruen. If we hadn't already invested time and money into the process, we would have walked away and gone elsewhere.Instead, we persevered and salvaged what we could - in the end, this meant doing the research and learning, consulting with other designers to get feedback, and basically coming up with the concept and answers ourselves and using Gruen just to draft the working plans.We felt there was no oversight of our project from the business owner. When we raised our concerns, we were told it was our fault for not knowing what we didn't know! And how could Gruen possibly be expected to know about building practices! Or good design! Baffling, there was no acknowledgment of responsibility as the owner of the business, or commitment to resolve. Perhaps because we weren't building a Passivhaus or striving for the architectural digest, the interest level was zero.Our experience can be summed up with - Gruen showed little eye for beauty in design; they rushed the plans which meant we had to identify and pickup on mistakes (angle of raked roof, highlight windows and depth of eave were wrong for thermal heating; positioning a water tank in front of window; including sliding doors with 60mm step over instead of flush with/recessed sill, etc.) They even managed to get the measurements wrong and a week before starting foundation work, we discovered the plans provided by Gruen had us building half onto our neighbours driveway!Fortunately we had a competent builder who was able to rectify their mistakes and we are happy with the finished job. However, the extra stress and time this caused could/should have been avoided.I also know of one other client who has walked away recently after concerns and a similar experience.Based on this, I'd be very hesitant to recommend!Edit: following on from the reply from owner below - it's disingenuous to suggest we did not try to feed back our concerns along the way, including emails that were dismissed. It's nice the owner is happy to engage now (12 months after completion), but would have been more helpful to receive a phone call at the time, which in my mind is an essential part of running a good business operation. As for a site visit on completion of build - why bother, it's a little after the fact! I hope Gruen takes this on and it helps them improve, best of luck.

We started our knockdown rebuild journey a number of years ago when we realised that our draughty, poorly insulated home was no longer suitable for our needs. Our old home was always stuffy in summer and chilly in winter.We did some research around sustainable design and discovered Simone from Gruen Eco Design. Simone is very enthusiastic about sustainability and it shows through her work.It has been a monumental project especially building through the pandemic and numerous lockdowns. Throughout the entire process, Simone and her team have been supportive and communicative. We always felt supported with just a call or email away to sort out any issues. A special thanks to Marian who has been so generous with her advice and time.We are absolutely astonished by the thermal performance of the new house. Last summer, we only had to turn on the air conditioner from time to time and have only started using heating in the middle of May this winter.Thank you Simone, Marian & Gruen Eco Design!

Gruen have been working with us at Older Women in Cohousing [WINC] on and off for a couple of years now. They've helped us investigate several potential development sites until we've finally purchased land for our 32 home, sustainable, accessible cohousing community in Castlemaine. Gruen have been very responsive and so easy to work with. Janine, their senior designer demonstrates that she has a deep understanding of participatory design. She knows how to listen, 'gets it' without us having to go into lengthy explanations. We've tried other, big name architectural practices and were tired of being 'mansplained'. We find Gruen to very well aligned with our way of working and our aspirations for highly thermally efficient homes that are still affordable and not necessarily registered as passive houses.

I reached out to Gruen Eco Design to discuss our home at the central coast in Old. We built the house 15 years ago and are now considering a renovation to enhance energy efficiency and comfort with a few modifications. I know Simone and the work Gruen Eco Design delivers in regards to sustainability, energy efficiency. and affordable solutions. I worked directly with the senior team to develop plans and renovation stages that will allow us to utilise the best possible passive design principles and outcomes for our home. The process was a great experience, with a lot of attention to details to meet our sustainability objectives as well as allowing us to plan in stages which was a top requirement.We feel now well equipped to proceed to the next stage. Thank you all for the great work!