Get all your news in one place.
100's of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
The Canberra Times
The Canberra Times
Sally Pryor

Why Canberra's new suburbs are full of massive houses on tiny blocks

It's a five-bedroom, 400-square-metre house set on a 528-square-metre block, complete with a butler's pantry, three bathrooms, a media room, walk-in robes and chandeliers.

Number 16 Carden Street in Denman Prospect is the absolute epitome of fine living in the year 2026.

And real estate agent Josh Wilson, of Momentum Property, has absolutely no doubt it will sell at auction for around $2 million.

"I think it might be a multigenerational family that buys it," he says, referring to the separate guest suite and two separate al fresco dining spaces.

Never mind that it has no garden to speak of, nor that it's just a couple of metres from the house next door, with rooflines almost touching.

This newly built and still-developing suburb is filled with very large homes on very small blocks, proof that the house is key and the trees are low-priority.

And many of these houses - near cousins to the 1990s-era McMansions - are jam-packed with features of the kind none of us grew up with.

Basically, if aliens landed here today and asked to be shown the definitive new Canberra house, Denman Prospect would be the place to take them.

16 Carden Street in Denman Prospect. Picture supplied

It's been quite a journey from the 1920s to here, via California bungalows, weatherboard cottages, red-brick duplexes, mass-produced govies, modernist bush structures, hillside family homes and city apartments.

Canberra's newest suburb is filled to bursting with every kind of aspirational home comfort you can think of, all crammed into theoretically energy-efficient and very definitely oversized structures.

It's something that architects like Shannon Battisson are encouraging people to look beyond, even though Canberra officially has the biggest houses in Australia, a country that has the biggest houses in the world.

One the living spaces at 16 Carden Street in Denman Prospect. Picture supplied

The national trend may be heading towards smaller dwellings, but Canberra hasn't got the memo. Wilson says multiple living spaces and a butler's pantry are considered a must for many clients looking to buy a brand new house in a brand new suburb.

This is despite the fact that not many people in Australia would actually have a butler. But such requirements are indicative of an increasingly multicultural capital.

Wilson says - as delicately as he can - that some of the homes going up in Denman Prospect are created according to tastes that "will appeal to certain ethnicities", although he has no fixed idea of who might buy this particular house, or any of the several others on his books.

Denman Prospect, home of the oversized home. Picture by Elesa Kurtz

Canberra in the 2020s is far from the staid white monoculture of the 1960s and '70s, and different cultures have different tastes. There's a reason the government has long left aesthetic considerations out of the equation when it comes to planning requirements. There's simply no one way, and hasn't been for some time.

Still - a kitchen within a kitchen, and three living spaces?

Battisson, who has built her own high-performing, solar-passive home on a smallish block in Denman Prospect just to show how it could be done better, says she's constantly baffled by things people deem necessary in their homes.

"If you don't have a big family, why build the big house?" she has wondered aloud, let alone a four-car garage and separate formal dining room.

Denman Prospect is a reminder that a house is well and truly a home, but even this word has a multitude of meanings.

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100's of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.