LIFTS are on the up and up as more homeowners strive to future-proof their house.
Smaller blocks, a drop in price and an ageing population wanting to stay in their own homes for longer are among reasons more homeowners are having them installed.
Lifts are increasingly being built into new houses and retrofitted into existing ones, making multi-storey living possible for longer for people who can't manage stairs.
Lift Shop sells a range of residential lifts and national sales and marketing manager Bernard Edwards has observed the increase in popularity.
Ten years ago they were still a bit of an unobtainable commodity,'' he says.
"You had to be super rich to get one. Pretty much in the last six to eight years they've become more and more mainstream.
"In certain suburbs -- Mosman, Bellevue Hill, Vaucluse -- where architects design new homes, they pretty much automatically include a lift as a standard inclusion. Those sorts of suburbs have sloping blocks or large subdivided estates.
"The blocks of land have become smaller and that obviously means people are having to build upwards instead of outwards, so that is pushing people towards future-proofing their homes or just making their house more saleable.''
Bernard says stairways present problems as people age, putting dream homes out of reach.
"They could be in their 50s or their 60s or even their 70s, and potentially facing the downside of all these steps,'' he says.
"By putting in a lift, they can stay there for as long as they like. We're seeing that in existing homes as well, where people who have a house over multiple levels are starting to find the stairs more difficult.
"They look at their alternatives -- moving to retirement villages or a smaller house, a different suburb, leaving their friends and memories behind. We've got a range of steel and glass shafts which can often be retrofitted to an existing house so someone can still stay in their house.''
TALL ORDERS
Bernard says installing a lift in an existing house isn't necessarily difficult because all that's needed is a continuous vertical corridor, either inside or outside.
"If you have a large wrap-around staircase with a void in the middle of it, it's basically wasted space,'' he says.
"We've done jobs where we've put a lift and shaft into that void area. You still have the stairs wrapping around it so you've used up space that wasn't being utilised before.''
Lift Shop have also built lifts into very limited areas, such as dumb waiter spaces. External lifts can be aligned with existing windows, which are removed to provide the opening.
Bernard says a typical lift has three stops but they can travel up to 12m, stopping a number of times in a home with a series of split levels.
While adding a lift to a design can be straightforward, Bernard says it generally takes between 14 and 20 weeks for one of their lifts to be ready for installation because they are custom manufactured and imported. As the lifts are tailor-made, buyers can choose to have one that blends in or stands out from the crowd.
Bernard suggests a glass shaft with glass doors for the wow factor. ``We can do anything from a two-person lift up to a nine-person lift,'' he says.
"We recommend not doing a lift any smaller than for three to four people as it just gets a bit claustrophobic.''
A SMART SPEND
Bernard estimates the cost of a base model two-stop lift and shaft to be approximately $60,000.
"Many people spend more than that on their swimming pool or their car so a home lift is certainly an affordable option worth considering, especially when thinking about the long-term benefits,'' he says.
A lift can enable someone to stay at home for longer, so the price of installing a basic model could be considered against the cost of selling up and buying again. Selling an $800,000 home may involve about $15,000 in sales commission plus legal fees, marketing and moving costs. The stamp duty on a new $800,000 home is about $31,000.
Bernard says lifts have become more affordable in the past five years due to a combination of competition, exchange rates and mass production.
A striking glass Lift Shop lift was recently installed in a house in Coogee built by Peter Scullion of Corrion Homes.
"I know of a number of older people who don't want to negotiate stairs who are retrofitting them into their homes,'' he says.
"They sacrifice a section of a room and use the upstairs.''
Another company selling residential lifts is PR King & Sons.
"Simple home elevators are relatively inexpensive to put into a house, new and retrofitted,'' director Oliver King says. "It can open it up for sale purposes to a broader age bracket.''
THE ONLY WAY IS UP
Incline lifts are another way to simplify access to homes on steep sites and allow people to stay in their properties for longer.
While conventional lifts go up and down, incline lifts are suited to cascading blocks and consist of a car that moves along rails.
Mainly seen in suburbs where blocks have steep access, they are common in Seaforth, Mosman and Palm Beach in Sydney's north as well as in Blakehurst, Oatley and parts of the Sutherland Shire in the south.
Marrickville-based PR King & Sons has been making incline lifts since 1954 and calls them "Inclinator'' under a registered trademark. Inclinators run on single or double rails and can be customised with features such as LED downlights and rounded finishes.
Single-rail inclinators can take four passengers, and PR King's double-rail models can carry up to 10 people.
Oliver says the cost varies depending on factors such as the site, the building works required and extras, such as structural engineer's drawings, but generally supply and installation for an average 20m Inclinator would cost $80,000 to $100,000.
"From a real estate perspective, if you were looking to sell a house on a steep block of land, without an Inclinator, you're automatically shutting out a portion of the saleable market,'' Oliver says.
"People over 60 may not look at a block of land with 100-plus steps to the front door.
"It does sound expensive to get an Inclinator but, at the very least, it should add that amount of value to your property.
"I'd like to think that it would add multiples of that.''
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