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Canberra-based Michael Drage didn’t enter housing through construction. He followed research, building performance and risk analysis—an approach that would eventually lead to the creation of Uncommon Living.
Part one of a two-part interview with Canberra-based Michael Drage, founder of Uncommon Living. In this first instalment, he reflects on his transition from finance into housing and explains how research, risk analysis and building performance shaped his approach to residential construction.
When Michael Drage left a 25-year career in investment and finance and relocated to Canberra, he wasn’t searching for an opportunity to disrupt the construction industry. He simply wanted to create something tangible. (main image: Architectural render of Uncommon Living’s medium-density housing concept.)
After decades spent analysing investments and managing financial risk, he found himself wanting to work on projects he could physically experience.
“I wanted to do something where, once you’d finished, you could actually touch it, feel it and stand back and look at something physical,” he says.
Speaking with Built Offsite, Drage explains that what began as a career change has evolved into a series of businesses centred on building performance, energy efficiency and, more recently, housing delivery. While each venture appears different on the surface, they all stem from the same philosophy: understand the risks first, then develop a better way to manage them.
Following global best practice
Drage describes himself as “an investment guy by background”, having spent around 25 years in finance before deciding to pursue a second career.
His previous businesses had been built around innovation and identifying global best practice. Rather than abandoning that mindset, he applied it to housing.
“I looked at where buildings were heading in the future,” he says. “Sustainability, energy efficiency and lifecycle assessment were clearly becoming more important. At the time, the best standard I could find was Passive House, so I went straight into the Passive House course and that became the benchmark from which everything has moved.”
The transition wasn’t driven by dissatisfaction with finance as much as a desire for a different pace of life.
“I wanted to do something a bit different and slow down,” he says.
Housing also appealed because it offered something finance could not.
“I’d done plenty of renovations and had financed property through our investment businesses, so it was always an area that interested me. I only ever intended to design a few residential homes. It was really about scratching an itch and doing something where you could actually see a physical outcome.”
That curiosity soon expanded beyond architecture.
Research before construction
Drage established Reimagined Habitat as a residential building design practice. It didn’t take long, however, before he concluded that designing better homes required a much deeper understanding of how they actually performed.
“I quickly realised I needed to understand buildings much better,” he says.
That thinking led to the creation of Efficient Habitat, which now produces more than 1,000 residential energy assessments each year.
Rather than treating energy modelling as a compliance exercise, Drage viewed it as research.
“We carried out an enormous amount of analysis. On one house alone we completed more than 500 Passive House simulations, pulling it apart and rebuilding it in different ways simply to understand what actually influenced performance.”
The work identified airtightness and window performance as two of the most influential factors affecting operational efficiency. More importantly, it reinforced a broader concern.
Industry research comparing completed homes with their original design intent suggested many buildings were performing well below expectations.
“That just didn’t compute with my investment head,” he says.
For someone accustomed to analysing risk, the obvious question became how to reduce that gap between design intent and real-world performance.
Reducing uncertainty
Rather than beginning with a commitment to prefabrication, Drage says he arrived there through research.
If construction could occur within a controlled manufacturing environment, there was greater potential to reduce variability and deliver more consistent outcomes.
“If it’s built in a factory, it’s generally harder to get wrong,” he says. “If it’s built entirely on site, there are simply more variables.”
He is careful not to frame the issue as factory versus site-built construction.
Excellent buildings can be delivered through either approach.
“The issue for me was always risk,” he explains. “How do we reduce variability?”
That thinking ultimately led to the establishment of Net Zero Plus, combining high-performance building design with prefabricated building systems.
Although sustainability often dominates discussions around high-performance housing, Drage believes developers are ultimately seeking something broader.
“They buy certainty,” he says.
For him, the challenge isn’t simply designing better-performing homes, but creating a process that delivers predictable outcomes, verifies building performance and reduces risk before construction begins.
That analytical approach has become the common thread linking each stage of his career.
Building design led to energy modelling.
Energy modelling led to prefabrication.
And prefabrication ultimately raised broader questions about how housing itself is planned and delivered.
Those questions would eventually lead to the creation of Uncommon Living.
In Part Two, Michael Drage explains why those lessons evolved into Uncommon Living and how the business is applying an integrated delivery model to medium-density housing and Australia’s missing middle.
