David Coates lives and breathes sustainability and has been delivering beautiful buildings that perform to an exemplar level in both sustainability and practicality. David specialises mainly in urban designs, with over 25 years of experience working within the building industry. His journey began as a 16-year-old apprentice carpenter and has more recently within the past five years resulted as a cutting-edge sustainable designer. Over recent years, David has shown Melbourne his innovative renewable energy creations, that are not only ‘sustainable,’ in every sense of the word, attracting quite a lot of attention amongst the growing sustainably minded community, they are also extremely functional and aesthetically eye catching, with a WOW factor of originality. His unique design stamp is now really making a mark.

After working in London in his early 20s for a number of years turning historical inner-city dwellings into state of the art establishments, David later returned to Australia and started his company Sustainable Building and Design. Initially, he specialised in sustainable renovations, but with a keen eye for design and detail, he now creates his brilliant dwellings all from scratch. All projects have sustainability at the forefront of their designs as David works his artistic magic closely with his clients to achieve brilliant results to minimise overall energy consumption and reduce wastes.

David’s vision is all about efficiency of performance and reusing and up cycling. His projects achieve high end energy efficiency ratings in the NatHERs score system, and as well as energy efficiency, his projects regularly contain old building materials upcycled form their former dwellings. David and his team even built an entire sustainable development using no mains power from an off-grid onsite power station, described by Renew Magazine as an ‘industry first.’ David designs new sustainable homes and renovates existing dwellings to exceed all expectations of not only his clients, but the greater community at large. He is paving the way for a greater movement in sustainable urban design by showcasing what can really can be achieved to improve our planet, not just talked about and his approach is to create genuine sustainability in building that is possible for the broader community. His motto is: We Can Do This!

Photography by Amelia Batchelor (Headshot), Dylan James (2, 3), Matthew Mallet (4).