We walk the land before a line is drawn.
Sun paths, soil, the neighbours' windows, the view you keep turning back to. The brief is written together, on site, and it starts with how you want to live rather than how many rooms you need.
Design & Build studio · Victoria
Every good home is built in layers.
Formworks draws the house, then builds it. One studio from the first survey peg to the last light switch.
Every house gets built twice. Once on paper.
Approach
Most builders inherit a drawing and make it work. We draw it ourselves. The person who sets out the slab is the person who detailed the eave — so the hard questions get answered on paper, where they’re cheap.
One contract
One signature, one price, one person to call. When something goes wrong, there’s nobody for us to point at.
Our own crew
Carpenters, a site lead and a joiner on payroll. The trades we don’t employ, we’ve worked with for a decade.
Drawn first
Every junction is drawn before it’s built. What you approve on paper is what you’re owed on site.
Process · the drawing set
Five sheets, in order.
A drawing set is numbered because order matters on site. Ours runs from the first walk on your land to the day you get the keys — and you always know which sheet we’re on.
01 / 05
You walk through the house before it exists.
Sketches become plans, plans become a model you can walk through. We test the morning light in the kitchen and the ceiling height in the hall long before anyone orders timber.
Every junction, detailed at 1:5.
Where the zinc meets the timber. Where the slab edge meets the glazing. These are the places most houses leak, crack or look unfinished, and they are the pages we spend the longest on.
You’ll know what happened on site this week.
The site lead reading the drawings is the one who asked the questions that changed them. Every week, progress is photographed against the sheet it came from — so you can see what was built, and which drawing said to build it that way.
The keys, and a number that still answers.
A final walk-through with the full drawing set in hand. Then twelve months of check-ins, and a maintenance guide written for your house and no one else’s.
Selected homes
Three houses, three sites.
Materials we return to
Chosen for how they age.
Start here
Let’s draw yours.
We take on six houses a year. Tell us about the land, the way you live, and roughly when you’d like to move in. We’ll come and walk the site with you — no charge, no drawings, no obligation to go further.