Nov
– Hi, I’m Jan Hogarth from Placemate Architects. We’re renovation specialist architects in Brisbane. And today I’d like to introduce you to our favorite town planner, Alex Steffan from Steffan Harries. Alex, you are a town planner. Can you tell us something about your business?
– Yeah, thank you very much for having me. So Alex Steffan is my name. I’m from a business called Steffan Harries. We’ve been operating in the Southeast Queensland region since 2008.
– Wow.
– So a long time.
– And so today we’re talking to regular people about what they can anticipate in a planning process and what’s the best way of them proceeding. What’s the biggest pitfall that you see with people who are thinking of doing renovations?
– Probably the number one thing we see is people not even knowing that town planning exists. So people who just start designing their house, either with an architect or they just start doing it themselves, completely unaware that the town planning process exists. So they forget about zoning, overlays. They don’t talk to a reputable architect such as yourself, and they don’t talk to a town planner. So first thing that people should be doing is calling a town planner. And the people who don’t are the ones who are losing out.
– A lot of people say, “What’s the town plan for?” What is the town plan for, what’s town planning for?
– Yeah, so town planning’s essentially associated with controlling or guiding the growth of a city. So it’s really a way of controlling population growth. Not in a way of stopping it or hindering it, but in a way of making sure that people have a nice place to live. It’s, they’ve got good services, they’ve access to public transport. Holistically, that’s what town planners try to do. What we do as development assessment plan is kind of on a more basic site by site per basis.
– So if I was coming to you with a renovation project, what are the classic problems that we would be looking at or the owners would be having to face?
– So many, where do we begin? So I suppose it depends on the zoning, what overlays you have, how old your property is, if it’s on a slope, if it’s in a bushfire area, all of these things you may be completely unaware of, but they can have a huge impact on the potential planning aspects and whether or not you can actually do what you want. So to find all these questions or find all the answers to these questions, really you need to speak with a town planner.
– Okay and when is a good time to actually start that conversation?
– Well, in my opinion, the second that you go, all right, “We’re gonna do an extension. Let’s do it, let’s find an architect.” Call the town planner immediately.
– I couldn’t agree more, yes, that’s the message. Don’t go down the track with your mindset set up that I want to have this, I’m locked into it. And then hand it to the architect and say, “Here, give me this.” Because you can waste your time.
– Yes.
– It can be so difficult. Between us, we can kind of work out what’s plausible, sometimes there’s a hard way and if there’s an easy way, let’s go the easy way, yes.
– And having that open relationship between an architect and a planner, we’ve been dealing with each other for so long. It really makes sure that you’re not getting led down the wrong path because you talk to us straight away. If the client hasn’t already, then Jen calls me or Mike and we’ll have that conversation. So you are not designing something that has absolutely no chance of approval. People fall in love with the design and then all of a sudden, we’re the bad guys. You are the bad guy and everyone’s upset with everyone. Whereas if you make that call early, whether it’s you or the client, then it makes sure that we’re all on the same page with the design pushing ahead.
– Now the other thing is, from a client perspective, we might be able to move into a gray area that is open for interpretation. So what you want as the owners and what the council guidelines are, there might be a way that we can kind of get the design to tick both boxes and manipulate.
– Yeah.
– That’s not out of the question, is that?
– Of course.
– Yes.
– Okay I suppose our core role with renovation projects is firstly to honestly try to see if you don’t have to deal with us. So we wanna find a way to avoid having a planning permit involved because realistically, it just costs you more money. It costs you time, is usually the big issue. And then you’ve got council assessing your application and you don’t want a government body assessing your passion, passionate family house. So firstly, we’ll try to find ways to avoid it. If we can’t avoid it, then we’ll find ways to make sure the design ticks all the boxes. Now, yes, there are some gray areas and interpretations of certain exemptions and those are the things that we’ve been dealing with for, I mean, I’ve been dealing with them for 20 years. Mike’s been dealing with ’em for 15 years. And we have a team of six other planners who have been dealing with it for five or six years themselves. So we kind of have this collective group of 50 to 60 years of experience of, well we can apply that wording this way, which may avoid you needing to lodge an application or maybe allow you to keep certain walls or renovate certain parts of the house without having council involved.
– It’s a bit different, in my experience, from building code or engineering where there’s a cut and dried, for instance, fire separation. There has to be a firewall, it’s a certain size.
– Yeah.
– You just stick to the rules, all sweet. Planning has more interpretation in it than that.
– Yeah, so the way the planning system works in Queensland, it’s a performance based system. So council will provide examples of how to comply, but general, so that’ll be the performance outcome might say, “The height needs to be generally consistent with the height prevailing in the street.” So then you go, “Okay, well if the whole street’s three stories, I should be able to be three stories.” But they’ll also provide an example of how to comply, what they call an accepted outcome. So that accepted outcome might say, “Well if you are two stories, then we’ll approve you every day of the week.” So being a performance based system, there’s a lot that we can do to kind of blend the words together, interpret it, twist it. If we have to, obviously.
– And so it is a collaboration. I mean, you’re getting that sense now, but you’d be going, “Look, they don’t technically approve three stories, but if you did this and kind of made it a bit more basement, it effectively is three stories. But the way it’s done, it doesn’t look like three stories from the street.” So we can kind of get the outcome that we want, and still comply with the rules. And it doesn’t upset council either.
– Exactly, that’s a perfect example. So if you’re only allowed to build two stories, a basement is not a story. And a basement can be out of the ground by one meter, but it’s out of the natural ground level defined by council, which is not usually what the actual ground level is. So you might actually find a way that you can have two stories and one basement. So all up a big three story house, but technically still compliant, you don’t need approval. So that’s where this relationship really comes into it.
– Now, something else I just thought we should mention. A lot of people come to YouTube because they’re buying from outside Brisbane and wanna find out what Brisbane is like. Now, just in comparison with Sydney or Melbourne, Brisbane is a regional government and Sydney has got like 30 different council. Brisbane has one. so it’s a different dynamic, isn’t it?
– I believe it’s the biggest council region in the southern hemisphere. So it is a beast. And there’s a lot of people who work there. There’s different teams, dealing with a town planner that has a lot of experience. We deal with these people. I went to uni with the coordinators and managers of these teams. So sometimes knowing the right person can also be of assistance, but not in a dodgy, sketchy way. In more of a, “Look, we’re having a problem, we’re not getting a resolution. Let’s pick up the phone and talk directly to the boss.”
– Great, what if you are just thinking of buying a property? So you’re not gonna do a renovation, but is it worth speaking to a planner at that point?
– 100%, you don’t know if it goes underwater, you don’t know, I mean, you should know,
– You should know.
– The bank will probably know. You don’t know ll of these little potential issues that could hugely impact on the value of your property, but also impact on your livelihood. Things like, firstly, if you’re gonna be displaced during some kind of disaster, things like insurance, whether you can do renovations in the future, whether you have to keep your house. There’s heritage overlays that mean you can’t change the color of your house.
– Really?
– Yep. We’ve seen heritage listed palm trees. So if you don’t know that these things exist, then you might just go cut down a heritage tree and then you get a fine of 30 grand. So one phone call with the town planner, that’s the kind of answers we can give you within 20 seconds.
– Well that’s gold right there I think.
– But don’t call me too much.
– No, no, okay. Now you don’t just work in Brisbane, do you?
– No, we work across Queensland. So our office is based in Brisbane and we have another one in Ipswich. But we service the entire of Queensland. To be honest, there’s not a lot of planning firms outside of kind of this little southeast Queensland region. So most planners do the whole of Queensland. It’s very rare to have a planner who deals interstate. And it’s because all the legislation is state focused. So if you are watching this and you dunno what town planning is and you’re in New South Wales, you probably have as much knowledge about the New South Wales planning system as I do.
– Excellent.
– That’s how, yeah.
– We don’t go to Tweed with you.
– No, we’ll send you off to someone else.
– Okay, now the other thing that we ask is, so in our architectural process you actually have two sets of approvals that you need to go through. Firstly town planning and secondly, building approval. The building approval is to stick to the law. So it shows how a building can be built. We do a different set of drawings for town planning because the way that the town planning assessors look at a building isn’t about construction necessarily. What is it about?
– Yeah, very good, very good question. So town planning permits are generally associated and they’re trying to look at the amenity and aesthetics. So how it looks, how it affects people. And not only in an isolated situation like for a house, but how it affects the street, how it affects the neighborhood. So we deal with loosely amenity and aesthetics and that can cover a lot of things. And then once we get that permit, it can go straight into the building permit.
– So with a town planning application, chances are your neighbors are gonna be checking it out?
– Not necessarily.
– Not necessarily, yeah?
– So there’s different, without getting in too much detail, there’s different levels of assessment depending on what you’re doing. So if it’s something pretty straightforward that everyone’s kind of expecting to happen, like you’re building a house on a residential allotment, that’ll be code accessible. Your neighbors do not formally find out about that unless they’re on the council website and set up alerts, which they can do.
– Well in some suburbs in Brisbane, there is like an action group.
– Yes.
– That keeps an eye on local developments. And especially say around the river.
– Yeah.
– There’s people who just watch developments because they’ve been burned by terrible developments in the past and they’re touchy about it. So you can’t assume that you’re gonna go under the radar with this.
– Yep.
– And there’s also nothing like, from my experience, a disgruntled neighbor who had a really bad time with the council previously and thinks that you might do something and they’ll just object for the hell of it, basically.
– Yeah.
– So you can get, you can avoid grievances by dealing with the planning stuff in front, but that’s my interpretation. Is that your experience?
– Yeah, dealing with neighbors from a town planning point of view, if it’s a code accessible application and you’re not doing something absolutely ludicrous, most of the time council’s probably just gonna ignore the submissions. They won’t ignore them, obviously. They’ll read them and they’ll get back to the people who’ve lodged them. But it’s a bound assessment. They have no appeal rights, they can’t do anything about it, their neighbors, other than ruin your relationship. But when it’s an impact accessible application and you have to formally publicly notify people, that’s where the neighbors could have some level of appeal rights. But for a house, the only time that you do that is for demolition of a heritage place, which I wouldn’t recommend anyone do. So, you’re probably not gonna be in this situation. And when it comes to neighbors, we really say like, you have to take a human approach to it. If your neighbor’s lovely and you get along really well and you have wines on Sunday afternoon, like probably tell them what you’re going to do. Because if you just come out of nowhere and lodge this application for this three story house overshadowing their pool, you’re gonna ruin that relationship. They’re gonna be whinging to council and you’re gonna have to deal with it. So having that line of communication’s good, but on the flip side, sometimes those relationships are already pretty bad. So trying to tell them about it is just gonna open up the floodgates and they all of a sudden think that they’re part of the process. So in that instance, we kind of say, “Well, you know what, don’t tell them we’ll lodge it, hope that they don’t see it, and they’re not gonna find out until the construction starts.”
– And similarly, you can say, I mean, we’ve had this conversation with people who have got extremely difficult neighbors and we design it so it’s by the letter of the law.
– Yes.
– And so you can say to your neighbor, “You can complain all you like, this is strictly above board, there is nothing wrong with this, let’s move on.”
– Yep.
– Which is a very sweet place to be in if that’s the situation that you are in.
– And that’s what a good architect can make sure that’s what happens. Because we certainly see the opposite. Where we will tell ’em and they’ll go, “Look, we have a nightmare neighbor.” And we go, “Okay, cool, let’s just make sure that side needs to be 100% compliant.” We get the set of plans that they’re now fully in love with and none of it is compliant and all of a sudden, the neighbor’s kicking up a stink and we have a huge problem. And then they’re angry enough.
– They contacted the counselor, all of that stuff. So, that can save a lot of time and grief and money for everybody.
– Yeah and money’s probably a big part of that. Like if a neighbor complains really aggressively, you can really lengthen out the time in which the council takes to assess it. So you might go from like a one to two month long process for a house renovation with council to easily a three to five month process. Just because council need to be looking like they’re taking into account their neighbor’s concerns. And most of the time that’s all it is, they’re just gonna delay the time. They might send you a letter that says, “You need to fix this side boundary.” And we go, “Well, it’s fully compliant, so why are you asking us this?” And then really it’s just to show the neighbor that council’s trying to control the development and it’s not on their hands. It’s the developer who’s done it and they’ve found loopholes. I could go on for days.
– Yes, you’re having a private conversation here.
– Yeah, sorry.
– One of the other things we know is that there are trends in council. I notice in character houses, things that are really strictly assessed at some years, five years down the track, that’s not such a big deal. And there’ll be something else that’s really concerning them, like parking.
– Yep.
– Or flooding’s a big deal, obviously we have floods, but the longer you get away from a flood, people forget, that’s another thing. So you don’t necessarily need to assume that what was a problem five years ago is necessarily interpreted the same way. Is that your experience too, or?
– Yep, yep, massively. So the way in which council interpret things firstly could change overnight. So unless you’re dealing with a planner, you’ll have no idea that those interpretations are changing. To be honest, sometimes council don’t know those interpretations are changing because we’ll talk to one planner who says, “Oh look, this is what we’ve been told. We’re interpreting it this way now.” Speak to someone in a different team. And they haven’t had that advice yet. So we tell them that, “Well, look, actually, you guys are interpreting it a different way now.
– Thank you Alex, I think we covered the core issues of what people who are in Brisbane who are dealing with renovations need to deal with as planning issues. I guess the best advice is call Alex early or call me early and then I’ll ring Alex so that we can get your project going with as few backwards steps and side steps as we can. And it’s just a better value development. Alex, where can people find you if they wanna get in touch with you?
– Yep, our website is the easiest way to get in contact with us. It’s just https://steffanharries.au That’s the easiest way to get me.
– Thank you, thank you for watching.
