People ask about the name.
Usually it comes with a grin. Sometimes a raised eyebrow. Occasionally someone just comes right out with it: “So… like an outhouse?”
Yes. Exactly like an outhouse. And also like the Bauhaus. That’s the whole point.
Outhaus sits at the collision of two ideas that shouldn’t have anything in common but actually share more DNA than you’d expect: the humble Australian backyard outhouse — the dunny, the thunderbox, the little corrugated-iron shed at the bottom of the yard — and the Bauhaus, the German art and design school that essentially invented modern architecture. One is arguably the least glamorous structure ever built. The other is one of the most influential design movements in human history. And somehow, when you put them together, you get something that captures exactly what we’re doing.
But this isn’t just a clever name. There’s a real story behind it — one that starts on Brisbane building sites, takes a detour through Berlin, and ends up in a backyard in Laceys Creek.
The Outhouse: Australia’s First Backyard Building
Every Australian property used to have a small, separate building out the back. Not a studio. Not a guest house. A dunny.
The word itself comes from the Scottish-English “dunnekin” — a compound of “dung” and “ken,” meaning house. It crossed the ocean with early settlers and, like so much language in this country, got shortened and made more Australian along the way. Dunnekin became dunny. The building it described was simple: a small timber or corrugated-iron structure, usually placed as far from the main house as practical considerations allowed, containing a wooden seat with a hole over either a pit or a removable pan.
That was the outhouse. The original backyard building.
Brisbane’s Dunny History
Here’s something that surprises people: Brisbane was largely unsewered until the early 1970s. Not the 1870s. The 1970s. While the city’s sewerage network began construction in 1914 and inner suburbs were progressively connected from the 1920s onward, a huge number of outer suburbs — the kind of suburbs many of us grew up in — still relied on the outhouse and the nightsoil collection system well into living memory.
The nightsoil man, or “dunny man,” was a real and essential figure in Brisbane suburban life. He’d come in the early hours, usually weekly, carrying an empty pan under his arm. He’d walk up the back lane — “dunny lanes” they were called, and many still exist as laneways between Brisbane properties today — swap the full pan for the empty one, and carry it back to the nightsoil cart. Before trucks, this was a horse and cart. The waste was taken to depots on the city’s outskirts for disposal.
In 1965, an estimated 45 per cent of Australian homes were not connected to a sewerage system. Think about that for a moment. Barely sixty years ago, nearly half the houses in the country still had an outhouse.
Lyle Barlow worked as a nightsoil collector for Brisbane City Council during the 1970s, collecting waste for the township of Mount Crosby each weekend. Mount Crosby — less than 30 kilometres from Brisbane’s CBD. This isn’t ancient history. This is within the lifetime of people reading this article. Your parents or grandparents almost certainly used a backyard dunny.
More Than Just a Toilet
The outhouse gets laughed at, and fair enough. It’s hard to talk about outhouses without acknowledging the smell, the spiders, the redback on the seat, the 3am dash across the yard in winter. Every Australian family has a dunny story, and most of them involve some combination of terror and comedy.
But look past the jokes and you’ll see something worth paying attention to. The outhouse was, in its own humble way, a remarkable piece of vernacular architecture. It was a small, separate, purpose-built structure, placed in the backyard of an existing home, that served a specific and essential function. It was built from whatever materials were available — corrugated iron, rough-sawn timber, sometimes brick. It was designed to be practical, not beautiful. And it was so ubiquitous that every single property in the country had one.
A small, separate, purpose-built structure in the backyard of an existing home. Sound familiar?
The outhouse is the historical ancestor of every backyard building that came after it. The garden shed. The workshop. The sleep-out. The granny flat. And now, the backyard studio. There’s a direct lineage from the corrugated-iron dunny at the bottom of the yard to the architect-designed, fully fitted modular dwelling we install on acreage properties across South East Queensland. The function has changed dramatically. The fundamental idea — a small, independent building in your backyard — hasn’t changed at all.
The Dunny as Design Ancestor
When we talk to clients about what we’re building, we’re essentially describing the modern evolution of something Australians have had in their backyards for over 150 years: a separate, self-contained structure, purpose-built, positioned on the property to serve a specific need. The outhouse was the original secondary dwelling. It wasn’t grand. It wasn’t impressive. But it worked, and every property had one, and nobody thought it was strange to walk out the back door to get to it.
That normalisation matters. The idea of a separate building on your property isn’t new. It isn’t radical. It’s been part of Australian domestic life since the very beginning. We’re just doing it better now.
Berlin, 2013: A Builder Goes Back to School
I need to back up and explain something about myself, because the Berlin story doesn’t make sense without it.
Before I studied finance, I was a carpenter. I did my Cert III in Carpentry, then my Cert IV in Building. I worked on residential renovations and commercial fitouts across Brisbane for years. I knew buildings in my hands before I ever thought about them in my head. How timber moves. How steel behaves. What happens when you get a detail wrong and what it feels like when you get it right. Building was the thing I loved. It still is. My true passion is building — a business, a drawing, a relationship. The act of making something from nothing. That’s always been the thread.
But I’d also started to develop a love of business. How companies work. How markets move. How you take something you can build with your hands and turn it into something that scales. So I went to QUT to study finance, and in 2013 I did a semester exchange at the Berlin School of Economics and Law.
That’s how a qualified builder from Brisbane ended up in Berlin. And Berlin changed everything.
The City That Teaches You With Its Buildings
Berlin is an extraordinary city if you pay attention to the buildings. And if you’ve spent years on building sites, you can’t not pay attention. You see the structure behind the surface. You notice how things are joined, how spaces are proportioned, where the thought went in and where it didn’t.
What hit me in Berlin was the divide. Not just the historical fact of the Wall, but what it left behind in the architecture on either side.
In the west, the streets have a certain generosity to them. The post-war reconstruction brought in light, space, considered proportions. Buildings that were designed with human experience in mind — how you move through a space, how light enters a room, how a street makes you feel when you walk down it. There’s an openness.
Then you cross into what was East Berlin and the buildings change. Not all of them — there’s incredible renovation and some of the most exciting new architecture in Europe happening in those neighbourhoods now — but the old Soviet-era blocks are still there, and they hit you differently. The Plattenbau apartment towers. Massive, repetitive, grey concrete slabs designed to house as many people as efficiently as possible with zero consideration for how those people might actually feel living inside them. The scale is deliberately imposing. The materials are deliberately austere. The message is: you are a unit, not a person.
I’d walk through these neighbourhoods and the shift was physical. My shoulders would tighten. The light felt different. The streets felt different. Not because of the weather or the people — because of the buildings themselves. Cross a few blocks west and everything loosened. Same city. Same sky. Completely different feeling.
As a carpenter, I’d always known that a well-built thing feels different from a badly built thing. You can feel it in a door that closes properly, in a floor that doesn’t flex, in a joint that’s tight. But Berlin showed me that the same principle applies at the scale of a whole building, a whole street, a whole city. The quality of the space around you isn’t an abstract concern. It’s the most physical thing in the world. You live inside it. It either lifts you up or presses you down.
That was the moment I understood: architecture isn’t just shelter. It’s how we feel. Buildings don’t just house us — they shape us.
Bauhaus Dessau: The Weekend Trip That Stuck
I was so inspired by what I was seeing and feeling in Berlin that I made a weekend trip to Dessau to visit the Bauhaus itself.
For anyone who doesn’t know: the Bauhaus school moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, and that’s where it really came into its own. The Dessau campus is the building most people picture when they think of the Bauhaus — Walter Gropius designed it, and it’s a masterpiece of everything the movement stood for. Glass curtain walls, clean lines, open workshops, connected volumes that flow into each other. The workshop wing has a fully glazed facade that was radical in 1926 and still looks contemporary a hundred years later. There’s nothing decorative about it. Everything is structural, functional, honest. And it’s beautiful precisely because of that.
Walking through that building as someone who’d spent years framing walls and hanging doors, I could read it differently than most visitors. I could see the ambition in the structure. The way Gropius was using industrial materials — steel, glass, concrete — not because they were cheap but because he believed they were honest. The way the workshops were designed so that art students and craft students and architecture students all worked in the same building, because Gropius didn’t think those things should be separated. The idea that a manufactured building could be a work of art, and that beauty comes from how well something works, not from how much decoration you stick on it.
I also visited the Bauhaus Archive back in Berlin. Between the two, something clicked. Here was a school that had only existed for fourteen years before the Nazis shut it down, but in that time it had given language to something I’d been feeling on building sites for years without knowing how to articulate it: that the quality of what you build matters. Not just structurally. Not just functionally. It matters to the person who’s going to live inside it. And you can feel the difference between a building where someone cared and one where they didn’t.
I wasn’t thinking about modular housing then. I was twenty-five, supposedly studying finance, spending my weekends catching trains to see century-old architecture school buildings. But something lodged that I never shook.
The Bauhaus: What I Actually Learned
The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany. The name translates literally as “building house” — haus meaning house, bau meaning building or construction. It was a deliberate inversion of the German word “Hausbau,” meaning house construction. Gropius wanted to flip the order. The building comes first. The house follows.
The school moved to Dessau in 1925 and then briefly to Berlin in 1932 before the Nazis closed it in 1933. In just fourteen years, it created a set of principles that still define good design:
Form follows function. The shape of a thing should be determined by what it does. Not by decoration, not by tradition, not by fashion. If it works well, it will look right.
Less is more. This phrase came from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the last director of the Bauhaus. Strip away everything unnecessary. What remains is the essence. Simplicity isn’t laziness — it’s discipline.
Honest materials. If it’s steel, let it look like steel. If it’s concrete, don’t dress it up. The materials should be visible and celebrated, not concealed behind ornament. As a carpenter, this one resonated. The best timber work I ever did was the stuff you could see.
Art and craft unified. A well-designed chair is as worthy as a painting. Architecture is art. The Bauhaus aimed for Gesamtkunstwerk — a total work of art, where every element of a space is considered as part of a cohesive whole.
Design for everyone. Good design shouldn’t be the exclusive domain of the wealthy. The Bauhaus embraced mass production and industrial manufacturing as tools for making well-designed objects available to ordinary people.
The Legacy That Matters to Us
When the Nazis closed the school, its faculty scattered and took the philosophy with them. Gropius went to Harvard. Mies van der Rohe went to Chicago. Jewish architects trained in the Bauhaus tradition designed over 4,000 buildings in Tel Aviv, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The influence spread into everything: the glass-and-steel towers of every major city, Scandinavian design, mid-century modern, IKEA’s democratic approach to furniture, Apple’s philosophy that design is how something works.
But the part that matters most to us is this: the Bauhaus was the first major design movement to seriously engage with industrialised building. Prefabricated components. Factory production. Standardised systems assembled efficiently on site. The idea that a beautiful home could be manufactured, not just built by hand. These weren’t afterthoughts at the Bauhaus. They were central to the mission.
That’s modular construction. The Bauhaus was thinking about what we’re doing a hundred years before we started doing it.
Outhaus: Where the Two Collide
So now you see it.
Out + haus.
The “out” from outhouse. The backyard. The separate dwelling. The Australian tradition of a purposeful building on your property, detached from the main house. The lineage of the dunny, the shed, the sleep-out, the granny flat. That deep, practical, unpretentious history of Australians building functional structures in their backyards because they needed them.
The “haus” from Bauhaus. The building house. The philosophy that says design should serve function, that materials should be honest, that simplicity is strength, that good design belongs to everyone, and that a manufactured building can be every bit as beautiful and considered as a hand-built one.
Outhaus. A small, beautiful, functional building for your backyard. Built with the same principles that changed modern architecture. In the same spot where your grandparents kept the dunny.
The name is funny. We know that. The outhouse association is deliberate — it’s self-deprecating, it’s Australian, and it immediately tells you we’re not taking ourselves too seriously. We build backyard buildings. That’s what we do. The dunny was the original backyard building. Owning that lineage, rather than pretending we invented something, feels more honest than a name that sounds like a Scandinavian furniture brand or a Silicon Valley startup.
But the Bauhaus association is equally deliberate. We’re serious about design. Our studios are architect-designed. Our steel-frame construction uses honest, industrial materials. Our modular manufacturing process is a direct descendant of the Bauhaus vision: factory-produced, precision-engineered, functional objects that don’t sacrifice beauty for efficiency. Form follows function. Less is more. Design for everyone.
And underneath both references is that lesson from Berlin — and Dessau, and all those years on building sites before either. Buildings change how you feel. A considered space lifts you up. A careless one presses you down. The difference isn’t luxury or expense — it’s whether someone actually thought about what it would be like to be inside the thing. That’s what we think about.
The tension between those two references — the rough, humble dunny and the refined, revolutionary Bauhaus — is exactly the tension we live in as a company. We’re building for acreage properties in South East Queensland. Our clients are design-aware people who appreciate architect-designed spaces, but they’re also practical people with paddocks and driveways and dogs and lives that don’t revolve around aesthetics. They want something that looks beautiful and works perfectly and doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not.
They want an Outhaus.
What’s Changed, and What Hasn’t
It’s worth stepping back and looking at how much has changed between the outhouse and the Outhaus, and how much hasn’t.
What’s Changed
Obviously, everything about the building itself. A corrugated-iron shed with a wooden seat and a pan has been replaced by a fully insulated, architect-designed, steel-framed dwelling with kitchen, bathroom, electrical, plumbing, air conditioning, and engineered compliance with Class 1a building standards. The materials, the engineering, the comfort, the functionality — transformed beyond recognition.
The manufacturing process has changed too. The outhouse was typically a rough, owner-built structure knocked together with whatever was on hand. Our modules are factory-manufactured using light gauge steel framing, precision-cut to millimetre tolerances, assembled in a controlled environment by skilled tradespeople. The Bauhaus dream of merging craft with industrial production is now the everyday reality of modular construction.
And the purpose has changed. The outhouse served a single, unglamorous function. An Outhaus studio might be a home office, a creative space, a guest house, a rental property, an ageing-in-place dwelling, a teenager’s retreat, or a dozen other things. The backyard building has been promoted from the least desirable room on the property to the most desirable.
What Hasn’t Changed
The fundamental idea. A separate, purpose-built structure on your property, designed to serve a specific need, positioned in your yard because that’s where it makes sense to put it.
The independence from the main house. The outhouse was separate because it had to be — for reasons best not dwelt on. A modern backyard studio is separate because that’s the whole point. The separation creates privacy, autonomy, and a sense that you’re entering a different space. Whether you’re walking to the dunny at 3am or walking to your home office at 8am, that short journey across the yard is a threshold. You’re leaving one space and entering another.
The speed of construction. An outhouse could be built in a day by someone with basic carpentry skills. An Outhaus is manufactured in weeks, transported to your site, and craned into place in hours. The timeline is different, but the principle is the same: a complete, usable building that appears on your property with remarkable speed compared to traditional construction.
And the universality. In the outhouse era, every property had one. We think we’re heading toward a future where backyard dwellings are just as normal — not for the same reason, thankfully, but because the same logic applies. If you have the land, it makes sense to use it. A well-designed secondary dwelling adds utility, adds value, and makes your property work harder.
A Name That Doesn’t Pretend
We could have called the company something sleek and forgettable. Something with “pod” or “haus” or “studio” in it. Something that looked good on a mood board but didn’t mean anything.
Outhaus means something. It says we build things for your backyard. It says we take design seriously but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. It says we know where we came from — the long, slightly ridiculous Australian tradition of backyard buildings — and we know where we’re going, which is toward a future where small, beautiful, functional buildings are a normal part of how people live on their land.
It also carries a piece of personal history. A carpenter from Brisbane who loved building things, went to study the business side, and ended up on a train to Dessau to see a hundred-year-old architecture school because something about it felt like an answer to a question he’d been carrying around on job sites for years. The question was: why do some buildings make you feel something and others don’t? The Bauhaus had the answer. And the Australian backyard had the site.
My true passion is building. A business. A drawing. A relationship. The act of making something from nothing. That’s always been the thread.
The outhouse was the first out-building. The Bauhaus was the first design movement to say that a manufactured building can be a work of art. Put them together and you get something that’s been underneath the Australian backyard all along, waiting for someone to build it properly.
That’s Outhaus.
Come see what a backyard building looks like in 2026.
Our studios are on display at Outhaus Ranch in Laceys Creek, South East Queensland. Book a visit and walk through the buildings. See the materials, feel the space, and decide for yourself whether the dunny’s great-great-grandchild turned out alright.