Grand Designs Australia

Life in Adelaide, the driest capital city in Australia, has made Mike Dare and wife Lowen Partridge passionate about conserving water. Like many people, they decided to put a couple of water tanks in their new house. But these are tanks with a difference. Massive, custom designed steel anchors that support the house above the ground. With the roof acting like a giant funnel, 100,000 litres of water can be caught and stored in the tanks which are hidden behind internal walls. It’s out of the box thinking and what Mike does best. With 40 years of design and engineering work on some of Adelaide’s most prominent buildings, he’s developed a reputation as a lateral thinker. But Mike is now responsible for creating something that looks great too and preferably in the colour he’s most comfortable with – grey. Mike likes total control so he’s acting as architect, engineer and project manager. Working with logical systems on a house built largely offsite in factories, what could possibly go wrong? Just all the things he can’t control: the weather, the schedule, his walling company going broke and most importantly – his wife’s opinion of the colour grey.