Foundational Homes, Delivering Sustainable Support Solutions
Autistic Haus is an innovative charity creating accessible, supported homes specifically for autistic adults, on evidence-based design principles.
Independently supplementing national support framework and providing a world-first housing model designed to optimise support delivery and outcomes for autistic adults.
Evidence Based | Autistic Led | Sustainability Values
About Our Founder
Absence leads by example, out loud.
Their story starts in a system with no answers, and ends with them building the one that should have existed all along. Absence was medicated for depression before they were even a teenager, alongside undiagnosed autism. It was the 90s. The traits were obvious. Specialists were told. Still, nothing was offered.
By 16, with no support ever reaching them, they had left school.
One thing cut through it all: time spent with their Nan, a boardinghouse mother at their school. She showed Absence what shared living could look like when it was done properly: the right resources, real oversight, and genuine warmth.
That memory became a seed.
Left to find their own way, Absence left home at 16 and found real friendship for the first time among other insecurely housed young people. It was survival before it was safety, and the years that followed nearly broke them.
In their early twenties, a thread led Absence into a room with renowned autism specialist Dr Tony Attwood.
Everything changed. He made sure they finally received the support they should have had over a decade earlier. Absence didn't waste it.
What followed was more than ten years of deliberate, relentless progress, built around one conviction:
Meet autistic people's needs first, without conditions, and outcomes follow.
Dr Attwood later called Absence "one of the ones I admire the most." High praise, and hard-earned.
With the right supports, including treatment for autistic catatonia and unreliable speech, Absence's health transformed. So did their purpose.
They discovered a gift for turning dense autism research into things that actually work in everyday life.
After studying Business in Design, Absence turned that gift into two tools: Autistic HAUS, a pilot housing model for the autistic community, and the Autistic Accessibility Design Manual, its evidence base.
Both trace back further than they might first appear, to Quaker ancestors who built asylums grounded in nature, access and dignity, against the conventions of their time.
Absence tested the model on themselves first.
A sustained 25kg weight loss. A stable health baseline. Enough capacity to navigate registering a charity.
Then they applied the same principles through a reciprocal care arrangement with someone whose autism presents almost oppositely. The result was healthy weight gain and improved self-regulation for them too.
This is the pattern:
Find what works. Then hand it back to the community.
For more than a decade, every pathway Absence has built for themselves has eventually been brought back to help other families.
Then two crises collided.
NDIS access was becoming harder just as a housing crisis pushed disabled and marginalised people further away from safe, sustainable homes.
Absence's answer was to build one model that could address both.
Autistic HAUS sits between institution and home, research and lived experience, support and sustainability.
A village built for the full spectrum of autism, with room for every presentation and every level of need, regardless of what systems someone can currently access. Even the name is deliberate. "Autism community" can mean everyone around an autistic person. "Autistic community" means autistic people themselves.
Ownership, not proximity. That distinction is the guiding line behind everything Absence builds:
Nothing about us, without us.
Autistic HAUS is co-designed from the ground up, by and for autistic people. Not designed at a distance and handed down.
Building something this ambitious, this carefully, takes a rare combination: relentless drive, genuine compassion, and the humility to lead by listening. Absence is building what they needed and never had.
So no one else has to survive what they survived just to be heard.