Delivering Dignified Modular Housing Across Regional Queensland
COX, in association with Hutchinson Builders, has completed the first site in a series of new low-rise modular housing developments across regional Queensland.
Located at Princess Street, Bundaberg, the project delivers twelve new homes – the first to be completed within a broader program in which the practice is delivering five regional sites and 106 dwellings in total. Additional sites are now underway in Yeppoon, Allenstown – Rockhampton, Avoca – Bundaberg and Nanango.
COX Director, Paul Focic
The Queensland government’s ambitious modular housing program is set to make a tangible difference to housing supply in the regions. Delivered in compressed timeframes to a high level of quality, the program serves as an exemplar model on how governments and private enterprise can collaborate to address the current housing crisis.
Across these sites, COX and Hutchinson Builders have designed nine typologies of low-rise modular housing. These typologies form a cohesive ‘family’ of architectural forms that can be configured in a variety of ways and multiple site arrangements, ensuring their adaptability to suit specific locations and future projects beyond these packages.
Dwelling Typology Summary
Underpinning the design is an approach that humanises modular architecture, pairing contemporary and traditional housing forms with familiar materials to help ensure the dwellings feel at ease within their future residential settings in regional and remote areas of Queensland.
A simple palette of durable materials provides a friendly, human-scale architecture that delivers long-lasting housing with minimal maintenance over the lifespan of the homes. Natural colourways drawn from the Australian landscape accent this palette, connecting each dwelling to its specific context and drawing on hues from its surroundings.
Screening, shading and depth are carefully integrated so each dwelling typology can manage Queensland’s heat and filter light – creating delightful, thermally comfortable places for residents to inhabit. Varied roof profiles, inspired by the classic Australian pitched-roof home, animate and articulate the streetscape to create visual variety within a standardised kit-of-parts approach.
This work forms part of QBuild’s Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) Program, which is focused on delivering more homes across Queensland in less time through streamlined design, modular manufacturing and construction efficiency. The new dwellings will be used as much-needed social housing in communities with high demand, as well as accommodate essential frontline workers.
Our ambition has been to create modular low-rise housing that feels neighbourly, warm and enduring – a series of buildings that any Queenslander would be happy to live in and call home.
With the Princess Street site now complete, we are progressing with four more sites to continue delivery of this important regional housing initiative.
