we don’t subscribe to styles, instead we craft design strategies for the built environment to work around people and their goals.

No — performance and appearance aren’t in competition here, they’re the same decision made twice. We’ve designed houses with brick facades, vertical windows, and quietly formal proportions that read as handsome, not earthy. The plants-and-timber tropical look is one option, not a requirement. What the simulation gives us is where things need to go; what they look like once they’re there is still very much a design decision, and one we take as seriously as the performance.

Not one we’d want to repeat on your house. If two Genome homes ended up looking alike, we’d consider that a failure, not a brand. Your site’s orientation, your family, your budget, and your taste are all different variables — the process is consistent, the outcome isn’t.

Not off the table — just tested first. Large glazing in the wrong orientation is how a home ends up needing air-con running constantly. We’ll simulate your site and tell you honestly where full-height glass works beautifully and where it’ll fight the sun all afternoon. Often the answer is both — glass where the light is kind, something more considered where it isn’t.

It adds real time up front, and we won’t apologise for that — it’s the work most firms skip. What it saves you is the much bigger cost: guessing wrong on window placement or material choice and living with a hot, high-maintenance house for the next twenty years.

Authentic means honest, not undressed. Brick, stone, and timber chosen for how they age in our climate can still be detailed with real precision — deep sills, considered proportions, careful junctions. Plenty of our work looks refined and formal. It’s just not refined at the expense of falling apart in the humidity in five years.

Very involved — the simulation informs where things can go, not what you have to accept. Once we know how air and light move through your site, the conversation about what the house actually looks like, feels like, and says about your family is entirely yours and ours together.

Both, always. A house that performs but has no personality isn’t a Genome house either. The simulation tells us how to make the house work; your brief, your art, your habits, and our design instincts are what make it yours.

Directly. Heritage work has taught us to be precise about what to preserve, what to carry forward, and what to reinvent — the same discipline we bring to reading an existing site or an old family home. It’s the same evidence-based instinct, just applied at a different scale.

Yes, but not because plants don’t help — they do with shading and evapotranspiration, and there’s real psychological benefit to living near greenery. The honest distinction is between needing dense, high-maintenance planting to do the climate and biophilic work, versus choosing it. We don’t believe it’s the only route.

Airflow, orientation, shading through form, and sustainable material choice do a genuine share of the climate work on their own. Where planting does help, we’d rather design it deliberately and lightly.

There’s a real difference between plants you maintain and greenery you simply have a relationship with. A framed view of a mature tree next door, a borrowed landscape beyond your boundary, a single well-placed specimen tree rather than dense planter walls — these give you the cooling and the psychological connection without demanding upkeep or inviting insects into daily living space. Where we do use planting, we can lean toward low-maintenance, structured choices — a single canopy tree over intensive ground cover, hardy species over anything that needs constant attention — so the benefit stays without the burden becoming yours.