About
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 10 years resulted as a cutting-edge sustainable designer.
DAVID COATES
SUSTAINABLE BUILDING & DESIGN
“David is living proof and a fantastic example of a complete success in being able to achieve a sustainable home with a negative carbon footprint. Graduating from the school of life, gaining real life experiences from living and working in other countries abroad gaining a global concept for sustainable design, he has brought to Australia a very positive gift with his enthusiasm and proactive approach to making a real change. His journey began as a 16-year-old apprentice carpenter and has ended up 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.”
Architecture & Design – Oct/Dec 2021-Sustainability Awards Winners Issue/Vol 57 No. 4/Projects Products People
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 & has more recently within the past 10 years resulted as a cutting-edge sustainable designer.
After working in London in his early 20s for a number of years turning historical inner-city dwellings into sate of the art establishments, David later returned to Australia and started his company Sustainable Building & Design. Initially, he specialised in sustainable renovations, but with a keen eye for design and detail, he now creates his passive 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.
Over recent years, David has been at the forefront of proactively promoting green building design in the Melbourne area, with a growing need for more greener designs. Building sustainable homes is imperative if Australian cities are going to meet UN Sustainability Goal 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities). The potential benefits from low energy urban dwellings are significant with cities currently accounting for up to 80% of worldwide energy consumption and 70% of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions.
As a result of David’s sustainable designs and contribution to climate action in Australia more clients are actively seeking out designers and architects who specialise specifically in sustainability. His work is admired and appreciated by the sustainable design community with the ability for clients to now see his finished projects via private home inspections and via promoted sustainability days such as Sustainable House Day both online and in the flesh.
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.