The University of Melbourne has helped to expose the real lack of day care places across Australia. Unsurprisingly the South Coast often has less than 0.5 places of child care per child, essentially there is 1 space for every 2 children. One of the growing suburbs that straddles the Coast and Highlands is Cambewarra. We are working with a small residential Day Care provider to help maximise a residential block for a preschool.
The struggle with day care and preschool design up and down the coast, is the lack of consistency between Council's on the development constraints for child care design and more often than not relying on 'existing precedents' to inform planning decisions. Cambewarra is a small regional village and home to a small Public School however, has no day care facility. Our vision is to help create a residential day care centre that is complimentary to the village feel of Cambewarra while, setting a precedent for small village day care design in the Shoalhaven.
Working closely with our client we are designing a centre that uses an existing home in creative ways to ensure that we can create a preschool that caters for children between 1-5 helping to ensure siblings can attend the same centre.
Child care and early childhood learning is a real passion for MAAD Studio and we are so grateful we have a client with such a vision and passion for small scale child care.