Fifteen Years: Building an Architecture Practice Across Australia | Reflection on Design, Growth & Gratitude
I didn’t arrive in Australia with a plan. I arrived with enthusiasm & experience, years spent in London and across Europe working on large-scale commercial & mixed-use architecture, and very little else. No contacts. No local knowledge. No network in the way that word usually means when people talk about starting a practice. What I had was a willingness to begin.
That was fifteen years ago.
Reflecting now, I am struck less by what we have built than by the conditions that made it possible to build anything at all. Melbourne gave the practice its first shape, its rigour, its early discipline, the particular pleasure of working at a small and careful scale after years of large and complex ones. Brisbane gave it something different: room to expand, to take on projects of greater complexity and remoteness, to work across types and scales and landscapes that I could not have anticipated when I first set up a desk in a one-bedroom apartment and began. Between the two cities, across the projects that came from both, and through the wild and occasionally improbable territory in between, the practice found its range.
And it has been wild. That is perhaps the thing I did not expect, not the difficulty, which you anticipate when starting anything from nothing, but the sheer variety of what the work would ask of us and where it would take us. Remote sites reached by dirt roads that tested both the car our navigation and the resolve. Projects that arrived without warning and rewrote our understanding of what we were capable of. A commission in Papua New Guinea that landed during the strange suspended time of COVID, when the world had contracted to the dimensions of a home office, and suddenly we were working across international borders and cultures and a landscape of extraordinary drama, a reminder, at a moment when reminders were badly needed, that architecture reaches further than you think and that the world, however temporarily shrunk, remains enormous and astonishing.
Running two studios across two states has been its own education. The logistical reality of it, the early calls, the late ones, the effort of keeping two teams connected and a single culture coherent across distance, is not something you solve once and move on from. It is an ongoing practice, like the architecture itself. What it has given us is a breadth of perspective that a single-city practice rarely accumulates: different clients, different climates, different ways of understanding what a building needs to do and be. I am grateful for the difficulty of it. I am more grateful for what it has produced.
But the thing I feel most, when I sit with the full span of these fifteen years, is gratitude for the people. The team members who have joined me along the way, to learn, to contribute, to bring their own intelligence and humour and point of view to the work, have made the practice what it is in ways that no founding vision could have achieved alone. Architecture is not a solitary practice, however much the mythology of the lone architect persists. It is relational, cumulative, built from trust extended and trust honoured over time. The people who have sat across the desk, who have argued a detail with me, who have driven out to remote sites and stood in the wilds and been invigorated by scale and opportunity, authorship and responsibility, understood immediately why it all mattered, they are the practice as much as any building is.
I think often about how much of this was luck. The client who took a chance early. The project that arrived at exactly the right moment and asked exactly the right questions. The collaborators who brought generosity and rigour and, more often than not, great craic. The places the work took us that we never would have found ourselves otherwise. You cannot plan for any of it. You can only stay curious, stay willing, and say yes more often than feels entirely sensible.
What I feel most, on the eve of the studio’s fifteenth year, is gratitude. For the clients who have invited us into the most intimate and sometimes largest decisions of their lives, where they will eat, how they will sleep, what their children will remember of the houses they grew up in, how their vision will manifest. For the landscape, in all its forms, suburban and rural, coastal and remote, familiar and utterly foreign. For the breadth of the work itself: the small and precise and the large and sprawling; the detailed and the vast; the projects that taught us something irreplaceable and the ones that consolidated what we already, quietly, knew.
Fifteen years is long enough to have a body of work. To be able to look at it steadily and see, within its variety, a consistency of intention. That is its own kind of comfort, the evidence, accumulated slowly and sometimes against the odds, that the practice has stood for something worth standing for.
I did not know, when I landed, that this is where the work would lead. I am glad, with the particular gladness that only hindsight makes possible, that it did.