Kennedy Nolan
Welcome to Office Talk, a fortnightly podcast featuring in-depth conversations with leading architects about their approach to business marketing and communications. I'm your host, Dave Sharp, an architectural marketing expert and director of Office Dave Sharp, a marketing practice offering specialized consultancy, marketing, and PR services tailored to meet the particular needs of architects. Visitofficedavesharp.com to learn more or follow the practice on Instagram at officedavesharp. Joining me on the show today are Patrick Kennedy and Rachel Nolan, the directors of Kennedy Nolan, a Melbourne based practice known for their approach to build form, contextual response, and a close relationship with landscape. In this episode, Patrick, Rachel, and I discussed how they reject the negative associations around following design trends and instead embrace the idea that their projects are reflective of their time and place and will eventually date as tastes change.
Dave Sharp:We discussed how having a strong workplace culture that encourages having a life outside of work gives them the energy and inspiration to come up with new ideas. We looked at the important considerations they make about the best way to photograph a project to enter into awards and submit to the media and how to create images that will better communicate ideas to clients. We looked at how the strength of their brand has helped them to move into larger scale projects over time such as Nightingale Left Field and a 16 storey hotel building currently under construction. We talked about why blurring the lines between architecture and interiors has helped their projects to film more emotionally engaging both in person and in photography. Finally, we spoke about the value of being an active participant in awards programs from the very start of their practice and the positive impact that winning an award for their first project had on their studio.
Dave Sharp:So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Patrick Kennedy and Rachel Nolan of Kennedy Nolan. Rachel and Patrick, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Patrick Kennedy:Great to be here, Dave. Thank you.
Dave Sharp:Can we please start off with a bit of a background, the 25 year history history of Kennedy Nolan? Like, give us where did it begin? What were you guys doing beforehand? How did it start? And what did that first, like, 5 years kind of look like?
Dave Sharp:Like, paint us a picture.
Patrick Kennedy:Rachel and I met living in a in the same residential college when we're at university. And, so we were sort of friends before anything, and then we worked in the same practice in Carlton. And, actually, very early in our careers, we started our practice. I'd I'd only been a graduate for 1 year. Rachel had been a graduate for maybe 3 years.
Patrick Kennedy:And, we started because it was the end of a recession in Melbourne, another recession in Mel in Australia and Australia. And there was this sort of big void because architecture practices had been sort of cleared out, because of this recession. And, things were just starting to go sort of some grain shoots. And so there was there weren't a lot of practices at the time. And so it and we looked around and we thought, we've got these ideas, and we don't think anyone else is doing this stuff.
Patrick Kennedy:And, you know, we didn't have a brass razoo anyway, so we thought, well, let's just let's just have a go. We didn't really know what we were doing, so we went to Officeworks and bought a fax machine, put an ashtray on the table, on the desk, and started the practice.
Dave Sharp:All the essentials.
Patrick Kennedy:We're hand hand drawing. I mean, it's 25 years ago, but, it, actually, in that time, it's been a real paradigm shift for architecture. Now we're in a time when, there are so many young practices. Australia has gone through this enormous economic boom. Architecture has particularly, particularly in residential architecture, has just sort of exploded in Australia.
Patrick Kennedy:And we have all these terrific practices and this really vibrant community. But I feel like we sort of came in at the start of that particular movement, back in 19 what was that? Late 90? 98, 9, 99.
Rachel Nolan:But it was kind of stupid like and fortuitous, I reckon, all at the same time. We were we were young working for practice, and we've been given responsibility pretty young. I think we realize that now in terms of, design running our own practice. We were kind of fresh out, but our bosses gave us quite a lot of design autonomy. So we felt confident in that area.
Patrick Kennedy:And also was we looked around at practice and we and we could see how practices were running in terms of their culture too. And they were it was quite old fashioned, really. It was very hierarchical. It was was very, male dominated. And it was very there was a sort of exploitative culture too, really.
Patrick Kennedy:Students were exploited, people were made to work really hard or had to work really hard. And we just thought, well, we actually wanna have a fun workplace too. So we thought, we've got some ideas about what a nice workplace would be as well. And so that was another, apart from our, you know, wanting to do some stuff in architecture, we also wanted to make a place to work, which reflected our ideas about it.
Rachel Nolan:There was an interesting little competition that ran for the Andrew Boych after 4, up in Sydney. And we were working 2 different practices at that point, and I had a tummy house in Fitzroy where we sat, dragged drawing boards into a minuscule little kind of space where we ate, and we did that competition. And we did it with another girlfriend who, Kirsten Stanasich, she's got Richard Stanasich up in Sydney. And we just thought we'd have a crack at doing something big like that. The size of it didn't kind of trouble us even though we've been working pretty safely in residential.
Rachel Nolan:And that was a little practice too. So I think that's kind of always nice when you hear these competitions kicking around, how it might give you the, maybe not the chance to win it, but maybe the opportunity to work together, to kind of flex that muscle, and try it, and talk about ideas. So I think that was pretty energizing for us. You know, we slept all night, like old school university, and we felt like it was exciting to do that. And it was, you know, pretty low tech, what we had to do.
Rachel Nolan:And we did it pretty quickly as well. We went we didn't labor over it, and I think that's that actually, that mechanism of working quite quickly in design has always sat there with us.
Patrick Kennedy:Yeah. I think I mean, this is the thing I think we found through that experience. We actually work together really well because we have some similar ideas about how you should work. Apart from the architectural language, it felt like a like an instinctive language we both shared. We didn't have to explain things to each other.
Patrick Kennedy:We both sort of understood things without actually having to articulate them. And in fact, we didn't articulate them much later in practice when we really we had we had to find a way to do that because we had to try and explain it to other people that we worked with. But, that was always really instinctive. And also and the speed, I think, is a is a good point to make because we're not we don't labor over stuff. We both have the same idea that it's, like, you know, work fast, work well, work instinctively, work rigorously.
Patrick Kennedy:I mean, it's evolved since then. And particularly now we have a practice of 25, 26, something like that. And a lot of really senior staff who are really integral to our practice and who we really rely on. So it has changed a lot, but I think that the the DNA is still there.
Rachel Nolan:It's it's funny you say that too, because I think having to find the language to talk about how and why you do it, which is, you know, one part of why we're sitting here talking today, is you have to like Pat said, it's instinctive. Often it has been, but you often have to find that language, actually not for clients, to explain them, but to your profession. And that kind of came later when you start to submit for awards programs, or you're talking with writers who are then writing about your project for a magazine. So you find that or you're or you're giving a lecture, or you're reflecting on the work in practice, but it's not the language used for clients. So we it kind of took a while for us to then say, why are we doing this?
Rachel Nolan:That's a it's actually a really great point in practice where you reflect on that. We weren't studying with any kind of manifesto. We were more just drawn instinctively to the same things, be it where we grew up, what was kind of amazing when our interest first peaked in the world around us, or super similar things that we enjoyed. And they're things that we still, to this day, protect and nurture in practice, and I think have probably become more mainstay now. But certainly in 1999, they were kind of a bit daggy to others, I think, but we loved them.
Rachel Nolan:We you know, they're we they really excited us. So, you know, that excited us. So, you know, that beginning felt pretty effortless. We just jumped.
Patrick Kennedy:But now, I guess, we're at an interesting point because we're finding as we're working on larger projects that we have to be able to explain our practice pretty pitily and pretty quickly and pretty strongly. And so we need the language around that. And because we've always operated off instinct, we've had to sort of investigate, you know, what it is we're doing so that we can express it or articulate it to others.
Rachel Nolan:And our staff need the language too because we're not the only ones representing practice. So there has to be an understanding of it.
Dave Sharp:Today's episode of Office Talk is sponsored by Office Dave Sharp. At Office Dave Sharp, we take a longer term approach to strategy, marketing, and brand definition. Working exclusively with established local and global architecture practices, we apply our structured and in-depth process to develop thoughtful brand strategies and a considered 12 month marketing plan for those looking to reflect on the direction of their business. By placing a stronger focus on highly crafted marketing and communications and elevating the quality of your brand elements, including messaging, visuals, media, and more, we're able to provide you with research driven methodologies that are backed by measurable outcomes. This style of thinking and working doesn't just consider your practice's impact and purpose beyond tomorrow.
Dave Sharp:It provides a thoughtful approach for your marketing that focuses on quality, not quantity. So for more information or to book a consultation, simply visit office davesharp.com. So going back to that kind of period that you were in then, you mentioned that you had some ideas. You wanted to start a practice. You had this kind of vision that was developing of the type of place you wanted to work.
Dave Sharp:And it sounds like the workplace itself was a really important element of that. There was also this idea of starting off with, initially, by the sounds of it, mostly residential projects, but then you were going into these competitions and collaborations. I'm I'm interested in how you were starting to put out kind of roots into the kind of non residential world and how early that started to happen as well.
Patrick Kennedy:I don't think anything was clear. I think we, and it and it wasn't strategic. And in fact, you you know, we did that original initial competition, but we really have not done a lot of competitions since. And that is partly to do with our practice model, is that, you know, we started and there was just the 2 of us, and we had enough projects and that were, you know, sort of rats and mice residential projects. And we basically would take everything.
Patrick Kennedy:We're very unstrategic. You know, it was it was hard for us to break into the into larger work, and it took us a very, very long time. Opportunities for younger architects were really thin on the ground in those days. They they just didn't exist like they do today. There was no sort of culture of bringing in emerging practice.
Patrick Kennedy:The term emerging architect didn't even exist. Like, it wasn't even something that was known about. So, we just did whatever we could get. And, you know, I re we I mean, I can remember Daryl Jackson saying, you know, never never refuse a project. Just do everything that comes to you.
Patrick Kennedy:And we sort of did that for a long time. Yeah. Happily, we have moved beyond that.
Dave Sharp:But let's, like, normalize it a little bit in that early era. You know, there's nothing wrong with that. It's not like you've got this, like, perfect selection strategy of ideal clients from day 1. It's like it takes years to possibly get to that point.
Rachel Nolan:In some ways, I reckon it's great for you to do that because you can establish pretty quickly. Like, if you're not exactly aligned, there'll be a little place where you'll cross over. It's almost like that little tiny piece of the Venn diagram where you can give them something they love, and you're happy with it. Like, you've gotta find that. And sometimes that interrogation of that little Venn diagram crossover requires it to develop a type of skill, which I think is really useful through our practice, to find the place where you can make someone give someone something very special and be proud of it.
Rachel Nolan:I mean, mostly, we're not gonna we've never done work we're not proud of when we're working on it. No. It's never been like, you know, we'll just do that for bread and butter. We've never really done that. We've always been, I think, pretty optimistic about finding something, a common ground, even if we're sitting far apart, I think, in early days.
Rachel Nolan:So, I think that's kind of about the optimism we would look for, and I think that was also part of practice. Like Pat said earlier, you know, if you gotta work, it might as well be a good place. Like, 1, you gotta make great work because that's you're pretty driven to do that, but you might as well have some fun while you're doing it. And I think that was that's, you know, there was never a conscious thing we set to do. Like, we'd had a lot of fun when we were young, and we certainly didn't wanna say, now we're working and not having fun.
Rachel Nolan:So that that there lies a challenge when your practice gets bigger is to keep that spirit of interrogation or fun or abandon when things get more serious. But, I'd say probably, and that's what we had in common to start with, like, when you had to have a good time. And I think that's important, really important in practice. But, yeah, I mean, we we were not all of our mates were architects either, and I think that can happen in a profession. Like, architects hang out with architects.
Rachel Nolan:We had a lot of mates because we were country kids, and we had lived in a college or university. We had a lot of mates who weren't architects, which really gave us a leg up in terms of young professional people coming out, and they'd never used architects before. You know, they were asking us, when when can we use you? That kind of first project thing. So, we were kind of spoilt for choice in terms of having people out there who and interesting people too.
Rachel Nolan:Like, you know, that's a golden ticket, isn't it? Getting an interesting client.
Patrick Kennedy:Yeah. But, I mean, to circle back to the comment about competitions, we didn't really do a lot of competitions, and that was partly to do with, our approach to practice too, which is that we didn't really wanna kill ourselves working. I mean, I wouldn't go as far as to say we're lazy, but we're pretty getting the probably on the edge of it.
Rachel Nolan:You know, I don't know whether it's lazy. I I think we just saw a lot of serious young architects feeling like they had to kinda kill themselves over it or get tied in knots over it or work all the time. And we I guess we've always had in common that if you work all the time just on architecture, there's no kind of external nourishment or interest coming in. So if you kind of kill yourself over it, how do you kind of have the energy to replenish or come up with ideas? And I don't know whether that was conscious or not, but I, there was a balance, I think, which
Patrick Kennedy:I don't think it was conscious, but I think it it is now because we have this is one of the things we've found out, that we've identified about our practice when we've been doing this work recently, is that actually, in order to practice architecture well, you need to be in the world, and to be in the world means you can't always be in architecture. We talk about it in our practice, and we say to people and to each other, you know, you're interested in travel or cinema or you play sport or you love art or you love music or, you're interested in food or, you know, all of these things. All of that or fashion, all of that stuff's really super important, in order to nourish your creative abilities as an architect. And not just to creative abilities, also your abilities to interact with people because you need to be in the world to be a normal human being. And so it it is a danger with architects that they they form these sort of, you know, pretty arcane little ghettos where they, you know, dress the same, and they speak the same and they only hang out with other architects and they speak in a in a different language, and and you hear the language all the time.
Patrick Kennedy:And, you know, for architects, it feels very normal. But, I mean, we're quite aware that outsiders or non architects, which is a term which is unique to architecture too, people will say architect or non architect to mean what other profession does that. And the and the thing is that, outsiders find it sort of weird and alienating and and boring. And so I think we're really conscious of of not doing that, of of being serious about architecture, but, really being in the world as well.
Rachel Nolan:I think architects, when they grow up through architecture school and coming out, I think sometimes they feel like they have to, like that's what being professional sounds like, as opposed to maybe and, you know, maybe that scheme is shed as people become older and feel more themselves and more confident. But I do think that's kind of encouraged almost at a university level to speak the speak. And it's actually not that inventive, the speak. It's more like, you know, it's like putting on an armor, or it's like speaking a coded language, and it's actually often not just having the the freeness or or to say exactly what you're thinking or how you're feeling.
Patrick Kennedy:It's surprisingly tracked.
Rachel Nolan:Quite trapped, I think.
Patrick Kennedy:It's just it's also it's surprisingly uninformative. Like, I mean, I actually don't think much useful information comes out of it either because the same adjectives get used in the the same sort of even the same sentence constructions. And actually, sometimes you write it and you think this this means nothing. And it looks like it means something, but it actually doesn't mean much.
Rachel Nolan:Well, you're rating it so often it doesn't land or get through or mean anything
Dave Sharp:anymore. Just going back to what we're talking about in terms of making that space to kind of have a life outside of work and to be in the world, I suppose, like, the challenge of growing a practice or any business is not getting into that position where you're just working like a 100 hours a week and you're kind of a living, breathing architecture. What are the key things kind of been for you guys? Is it just like kind of always reflecting on it and go and making sure we're doing it or encouraging it? Or, is it something a bit more organized?
Dave Sharp:Or is it sort of a philosophy that you've had around hiring and making sure you're not putting too much on your plate and your employees' plates. So how do you kind of maintain a sort of laid back laziness that you just got as you grow like a 26 person practice that's doing, like, this huge range of projects and
Rachel Nolan:I think it really helps at a kind of basic structural level is that our partners aren't architects. So, you know, you kind of move back into your world at night, and you don't talk about it necessarily, or they've got pressures on you to do things, or you have different responsibilities. I think I mean, it's interesting. We always get asked if we're partners, as in life partners, because we're a man and a woman. And it's always the question asked of a man and a woman practice, which has to be a bit like you're kidding, but when you actually look at male and female practice, a lot of them are life partners as well, which, you know, makes sense.
Rachel Nolan:It's a great juggle when you have kids. I mean, we our partners are architects, and and I enjoy that. I should never say to architects, like, gong, I could never have ended up with an architect. But it's quite nice to have that ability to I think that helps us jump out, jump in, stop thinking about it at night, travel with them and talk with them about have different interests with them. But, you know, I can imagine if you're both got your heads on the pillow at night and you are life partners, it's probably pretty hard to escape business and architecture together.
Rachel Nolan:So I feel quite grateful for that.
Patrick Kennedy:I think I think I should also add that we don't always succeed in this balance too. I mean, there are certain client groups and certain types of projects which actually do put huge amount of pressure on our practice. And no matter how protective we wanna be of our, time, we can't we can't always achieve it. So it's just I think it's as good to have it as a priority. Doesn't mean you we can apply it rigorously for every single hour of the day.
Patrick Kennedy:Sometimes sometimes, pressures just come in. It's just the reality of our production.
Rachel Nolan:Oh, we work hard under a lot of pressure. I feel like we have been doing that actually for the last 10 years. So it's it's probably a fantasy. And we work additionally when we have to, and we don't like we don't like working less when our people are working more. Like, that feels wrong.
Rachel Nolan:That doesn't feel like the right thing to do either. If they're here, we're here. We check that balance. It's not like, you know, we're off doing stuff and they're sliding here, but we really try for that not to happen. But I think the
Patrick Kennedy:I think the world's caught up a bit with this. I don't think I know it has, because, you know, younger generations of people, arctics, of all professions actually, are much more protective of their time. And that is you know, we can go into the reasons for that. I think it's been very well discussed. And look, it's it's actually it's a good change, I think.
Patrick Kennedy:Sometimes it requires a bit of balance, But I think, yeah, by and large, that sort of world view is pretty pretty normal now.
Dave Sharp:Yeah. Absolutely.
Rachel Nolan:We have we have reached a point in our careers where some ways that we think we know, we start to sound like old people. It's like, Get in here. Do some more work. You know, we are we are starting to enter into that mode of of having been in practice for 25 years and being the age we are where we already know that we can sound like older people. It's quite a shock, actually, Dave.
Dave Sharp:I'm interested if there were turning points along the way where maybe the first time you felt like things were really starting to take off in terms of a project that was suddenly all over the place or an increase in interest in Kenny Nolan just amongst the architecture world, maybe to begin with, and then maybe amongst the mainstream. I won't say the non architects. I'll just say regular society. Were there any, like, inflection points that you noticed where things started to feel like they were really changing?
Patrick Kennedy:I would say no, but that doesn't mean we didn't have them. Practice, you know, we're in it every day and we have really little, we have little capacity to understand how our practice is saying externally. We just, it's really hard for us to know what that is. And you know, when you're in it every day, inflection points are hard to identify. I think every, every week has points of triumph and disaster, I think.
Patrick Kennedy:Not to be overdramatic, but, you know, it does feel like 1 step forward, 2 steps backwards sometimes. And so I think it's I think what I would say about it is that our practice has been consistently incrementally, had had growth. So we haven't really had setbacks and we haven't had huge surges forward, but it has very consistently grown. And that's, I think we've been really fortunate to have that. And also it's kind of the way we wanted to do it.
Patrick Kennedy:We weren't really interested in, you know, making a huge big splash onto something new when we're not resourced to manage it and we don't know what we're doing. So I think that incremental nature of our growth and look, you know, we're we're still growing, I hope, has been has been really easy to manage and positive for us.
Rachel Nolan:Well, I I would say yes to your no in a way, because I think we went in awards programs early. Some practices don't do that till later. And we actually went for our first house, and we were pretty you know, there were hand drawings that kind of halfway went up in the exhibition building, Institute of Architects Awards, a bit crooked, and we're going on laughing at it. We got an award for our very first project in Victorian Awards. And it was a little pretty humble, but it shook a few things up.
Rachel Nolan:It tested a few ideas, projects. So we got a we got a nice little injection from that one, knowing that our peers were could see us doing something different, or, like, who are they? That started early. We realized the kind of energy you can plow back into practice from winning awards too, so we've been a pretty active participant in lots of awards programs. So that was kind of creeping along.
Rachel Nolan:So we get nice you know, mostly we're working hard, and every now and then we stick our heads up out of the hole and we get a little hit. It's always nice to win something or to be recognized rather than win. And I think recently, in the last 10 years, I felt like it's been it's gone pretty quick, and we've been pretty busy, but every now and then, like, we might be in environments outside of architecture, or when more people know about architectural practices, I think, in the general community than they used to. Like, they learn about chefs, and they learn about interior designers. And when people ask you what your practice is, in more recent years, we've had more people know who we are, or more recognition, or younger architects understanding, knowing the practice, or wanting to work for us.
Rachel Nolan:So that's been when we mentioned where we're from, that's that's a nice little hit. Yes?
Dave Sharp:Does that still seem sort of surprising to you when that happens in terms of, wow, there's, like, actually a fairly big number of people that are aware of the name of our practice? There's name recognition around us and our projects?
Rachel Nolan:I think so. I I think that's something we often kind of talk about. Or it's interesting, you can be in a certain type of print editorial, which you kind of forget that certain print editorial means a lot to certain people when they see you in it, where we haven't really thought about it that hard. But, you know, like, what when people get shocked to see you with certain print editorial, which we, I don't know, maybe we've got a bit cheeky where we sometimes we take it for granted and we shouldn't, being asked to be in that type of editorial, or have that recognition too. So, you kinda forget the perception outside of our profession.
Rachel Nolan:Often, we're focused on the perception within our profession. Maybe that's what board programs teaches us to do too.
Patrick Kennedy:Yeah. I mean, those sort of brands are developed in service to an industry which is to do with, you know, Australia's burgeoning, interesting property and real estate and lifestyle television and, you know, the sort of cult of home ownership and high renovation and stuff. So I guess our practice has evolved parallel with that evolution as well. And so inevitably, even though we're only one really tiny part of that world, inevitably, like, recognizable brands, which come with imagery and, you know, awards and stuff. I mean, they're they're useful for that industry to to deploy.
Patrick Kennedy:And I guess we've always been an easy one to deploy because, you know, we're gregarious, and we always have, you know, beautiful photographs and, we're always happy to speak and talk and have an opinion. So I I guess that's kind of how that's emerged. But it's interesting. It does feel slightly disembodied from the reality of what we do and, not slightly. It it feels disembodied from the reality of what we do.
Patrick Kennedy:It's it's, it's a it's a almost like a parallel thing. In what way? Well, because there's, you know, there's a perception of what our practice is and then there are and those perceptions are quite different from one another, in different segments of the world. So for example, we're working on a city building at the moment. It's a, you know, it's a 16 storey new hotel, and we've done the building and the interiors, everything in it.
Patrick Kennedy:And, and the, client development manager said recently to us, he said, oh, I didn't know you did buildings other than houses. This is like, well, you're working on this building with us. You don't know that. But that perception is very common. And we do, you know, we do a really diverse range of work.
Patrick Kennedy:So, but it's because the housing side of it is so incredibly promoted in marketing and media and and real estate that it skews the perception of what our practice actually really is. So it doesn't feel always completely authentic to us.
Rachel Nolan:No. And and what you can learn working hard for a long time in residential, delivering single residential buildings, can be used on other building types so well. Like, it's been and, you know, actively using our brand for a model like Nightingale really helped us move in move into that space of delivering, a different scale, a different kind of mix of buildings that Melbourne or that Australia desperately needs. And the brand gave comfort for people to buy into it too. So how do you, you know, and also we learned when we started delivering housing at density, we also had a job to protect our brand, which we never thought about when we were young, really.
Rachel Nolan:Like, now we we we need to think about that quite carefully.
Patrick Kennedy:I mean, the residential brand still drives some of our other work because people will come to us and say, oh, we know you do that really well, and we're looking for something different in this project. So we'd we'd like to speak to you. So that actually sometimes it gives us the in inside, running into some of these more diverse projects. But it's interesting where it's coming from. You know, conventional procurement is like, you know, we're doing a basketball stadium.
Patrick Kennedy:Show us the last 10 basketball stadiums you did. So we're never we're never we're never gonna succeed on that basis, but occasionally someone will say something like, we're doing a basketball stadium, but we we want it to feel like a home. So we think you could do a that's a Yeah. That's just an example of that actually hasn't happened, but similar things that have happened.
Dave Sharp:It seems like in the case of Nightingale and also the hotel, there's a value and a benefit of your residential brand to both of those projects. Obviously, Nightingale more immediately, but the hotel, I think, obviously, they're selling the idea of experience a night or a few nights in a Kennedy Nolan domestic space, even if it's a small hotel room. That's like an experience that there's a lot of people that would be keen to have. I've never slept tonight in a Kennedy Nolan house. I would probably like to give it a go.
Dave Sharp:You know? So the hotel is kinda like I get to get that experience. Definitely kind of leveraging your brands as part of the the marketing of the project. Right? And you were talking about how your brand is kind of deployed in a way out there as one of the sort of better known ones.
Rachel Nolan:You learned that the hard way.
Dave Sharp:What do you mean?
Rachel Nolan:Branding kicking around beyond you. Like, early days when we worked for a developer, very keen to deliver houses at scale, which we then had no involvement in. 1 of them with documentation, another one's with admin. And to this day, those apartments are being sold with our names on them. The agents will use that to get the people there because we had a hand in it at some point.
Rachel Nolan:So, you know, you learn those things the hard way, and then you realize what it's worth or and what it might be worth even more in 5 years. Like, I don't know. We we don't know what our brand's worth in 5 years, but you learn. You absolutely make all of your big mouth. You're like, I've made so many learned so many lessons the hard way.
Dave Sharp:It's like when you see hear these stories about the Beatles' first record deal where they're giving away 95% of their royalties to some person. But, like, you know, you're in that early stage and you're not really thinking about how's my brand gonna be used or or my image gonna be used later on down the road. You're just doing what you need to do. But now you kind of look back, and I think a lot of practices look back and they think, I wish we weren't attached to, you know, that development or whatever that project was. I mean, it's not such an issue that everyone has to deal with, but I think to your point, Rachel, about being careful about protecting the brand where you make that transition to actually worrying about it or having thoughts about it at least.
Dave Sharp:Maybe not worry. I'm sure you're not staying awake at night going, oh, no. The brand Yeah. I need to protect I had a terrible nightmare. Something happened to the brand.
Dave Sharp:Do you wanna maybe speak to just that issue around that that change of mindset towards the brand being you go from just thinking about maybe not thinking about building the brand, but thinking about building the practice, growing, doing new things to maybe starting to have a bit of a mindset shift where you're like, actually, I've got something I need to kind of manage and protect, and I need to think about the things that I do and how those kind of could potentially impact on the way the practice is seen.
Rachel Nolan:The brand's bigger than us now because we have 4 other directors in the practice too. So the brand has to be probably made more clear what it is so all, you know, 25 of us can disseminate it too and understand if where the outside comms are or you're somewhere talking about it, that you're representing it too? I mean, that sounds pretty more corporate than the way we function, but but there's truth in that, I think.
Patrick Kennedy:Yeah. I mean, it's it's sort of it has to become very we have to translate it into a set of values, really, and and make that make it known. Because I think for Rachel and I, we we don't do everything in this practice, and, it is about our colleagues as well, and we're really conscious of that. And but we do feel like, you know, we have we've made something which has a distinct personality, and we wanna hold onto it because, you know, you see so many, in architecture, you very frequently see, brands, devalue over time as the principals lose interest or Yep. Lose the plus.
Patrick Kennedy:Yep.
Dave Sharp:Yeah. Yeah.
Patrick Kennedy:And, they, you know, they can pretty they can decline pretty quickly and pretty precipitously. And I think we're really conscious of that not happening. But, you know, and that means we have to invest in our who we are, and also invest in our colleagues, and push our colleagues forward, and support them, and and, make sure we've got really good colleagues, which which we do. Avoiding stagnation really where it stops evolving and it just kind
Dave Sharp:of goes into this sort of flat line of nothing really growing, developing, improving. It just kind of is there, and then that tips over into that decline of the brand. Why do architecture brands decline without know, speaking to anyone specifically?
Patrick Kennedy:But I think there's a couple of ways it happens. One is if there's a house style or there's a particular, you know, language that a practice pursues all the time, that can become sort of pretty arid and bankrupt over time. Now that's not something we do because we are interested in freshness and newness all the time. But the freshness and the newness always comes from the same set of values. So I think that's quite energizing to a practice.
Patrick Kennedy:The other way it happens is if practices bring in a hotshot or a young island to re energize design, but then it's an it's a disembodied voice. So it doesn't actually relate to anything to do with, with that brand. So I think for us, you you need to have the values in place, and you need to be always looking to for newness and freshness and innovation and, you know, and being in the world helps you do that. I mean, you you see this, like, kind of sort of faster cycle with fashion brands. You know, they flame out quickly because they keep doing the same thing over and over again, or they bring in an outside designer who doesn't really get the the values of the brand and and screws it up.
Patrick Kennedy:So I think it's just and a longer sort of time frame, that's how it works in architecture or can work in architecture.
Dave Sharp:I
Rachel Nolan:mean, there's oh, look. There's fashion, isn't there, in architecture? It's pretty you can see there are certain practices which just lead, and then 5 years later, you see a whole lot of other work look like it. It happens all over the country, and it's absolutely flattering to those practices. And it's scary if anyone ever does it better, even though they've kind of let it.
Rachel Nolan:We've seen it happen in 25 years. Like, it's fashion effects, and it doesn't mean there's not lots of terrific architecture that's very well done, but in terms of new ideas, there's pretty not that many new ideas happening. I think we've seen some really interesting, strong leaders who happen to be our peers in this country as well. So there's pressure on us not to do the same stuff all the time too, because, you know, if you if you can kind of stuff catches up with you pretty quickly. And we also work in an interior world, and that's faster.
Rachel Nolan:Again. Yeah. Like, those products get rolled out quicker again. So not just for the energy it creates within practice to keep us energized and having fun with it or testing things. It's just like, you gotta keep going.
Rachel Nolan:You gotta not look like you're copying yourself either.
Dave Sharp:So I
Rachel Nolan:think there's a real urgency around that at times. I mean, look, this isn't all forefront in our heads every now when we're trotting up and sitting at the desk. But every now and then, like, even sitting down to talk to you, or we go to a symposium, or we give a lecture at uni, like, we stop and we think about that. Like, we, you know, you stick your head up and you're out of the hole for a while and you get conscious, then you you go back down and you're just dealing with the
Dave Sharp:It's at the forefront of my head. I'm always thinking about this issue because it comes up all the time. It's way doing these things. On the podcast and in my day to day work. Well, firstly, I think it's a great point that I think your interiors world is keeping you on your toes in a really good way.
Dave Sharp:I think there's, like, a pace to that world that kind of keeps you needing to be fresh and original. The thing that gets spoken about by architects often is this idea of they might try and make this argument to the world of, you know, we don't follow trends or fashion or whatever. It's all about this timeless enduring quality where it's like, it's it's not about going with that stuff. And we kinda get that, and that makes sense. They'll also, you know, go the other way and say we don't have a style that comes up all the time.
Dave Sharp:You know? And you mentioned earlier, Patrick, like, us having a style and kind of getting locked into this thing that then starts to, like, date and go out of style is a bit of a risk factor for that decline of the practice as well. And then on the other hand, there's these architects that make a good argument for that sort of timeless enduring thing in terms of where they reference their own work and each project becomes like a slight iteration on the previous one, and they're, like, kind of trying to create this pure refined thing over time as a body of work. I hear all these arguments through the podcast. I'm like, they all kinda have their own merits, but I think you're one of the few people who have come on and gone, you know what, like, there's a lot of copycatting.
Dave Sharp:There's a lot of the pack catches up really quickly. You actually have to be kind of on the front foot and sort of at the forefront of these things. There's a kind of an honesty in that I find really refreshing because I don't hear people saying it very often.
Patrick Kennedy:I think that the distinction I I think is that, yes, you can have a a style and refine it and work on it. And that that's that's a wonderful pursuit, but ultimately, the energy can leech out of it. So if you if you look at, like, a famous architect like Corbusier, now he he like, he can pick his work whenever you see it, but there is enormous growth in that in that work over time, even though it's still distinctively his because he still was always interested in newness and freshness and something else. And the other thing is about, you know, I'd when people say I don't have a style, that's that's not all that's not a an antidote to that because you can you might not have a style, but you still have to have design values which are consistent. So it might not look the same, but your values have to stay the same.
Patrick Kennedy:And so that's that's the difference I think between that's the nuance of that of that discussion.
Rachel Nolan:Yeah. I absolutely agree. I just was thinking about the same thing, about timeless and enduring principles. They might not be the things you see when you look at a magazine or people perceive your work. It might be how the building works spatially, or how it's organized, or the kind of reverence for domestic space, or how it's,
Patrick Kennedy:How it's experienced, how it's relationship to a landscape.
Rachel Nolan:Those those things in our practice are consistent. Actually, we forget they are they are so our particular DNA. We actually very rarely articulate them nor speak about them. They're the that's the kind of muscle response. Yeah?
Rachel Nolan:Or the but we probably sit in how it looks being more experimental as opposed to the that kind of timeless enduring how it feels. And that's
Patrick Kennedy:I think that goes down to the the other point you made about things not following fashion. I mean, I think if you don't follow fashion, you are missing out on a major part of the world because humans, evolution is all about change. And I think fashion is fascinating.
Dave Sharp:Agreed.
Patrick Kennedy:I mean, if you follow fashion blindly and just say, oh, that's in, I'm gonna do that. That's that's that's really dumb. Right. But if you're looking around and you're seeing things and they're influencing you and you're in that world, that's actually that adds richness to your experience. And like, you know, to to take the extreme of that, it's not a fashion, but something that's happened in the last few decades is an awareness of climate change.
Patrick Kennedy:Now if you're not gonna engage with that as something that's around you, you're not actually you're not actually for, producing anything which is very, useful or interesting, I think. So you have you have to be looking outwards. You have to be aware of what's happening in the world, and you have to make judgments about whether you think it's worthwhile or not. But to say I'm just gonna do something that's timeless, that's the same all the time, nothing can come from that.
Rachel Nolan:We have we have this kind of absolute repulsion for with anyone saying, I don't want it to date. It was like that's a little kind of like alarm bell that goes off. She's like, you know, it but, you know, we actually look at projects. We know exactly when they're from, and they're great. And they're great because they are from that time.
Rachel Nolan:So, you know, presumably, you don't want anything to date badly, because it was probably always rubbish at the time. It remains rubbish. But that that fear of dating, I think we I don't know. Maybe it was like a eighties term or seventies term that we grew up with. You know, those that kind of funny language of, like, oh, but it's so dated or
Patrick Kennedy:I mean it
Rachel Nolan:is a completely kind of pejorative reflection.
Patrick Kennedy:I mean, everything does date, and but it should date. There's actually a absolute joy in things dating.
Dave Sharp:I mean,
Patrick Kennedy:you know, people love 17th century architecture and they love Victorian architecture and fifties architecture, and they love seventies architecture.
Rachel Nolan:Mhmm.
Patrick Kennedy:I mean, there's only really a horror of the recent past. That's really what people have an issue with, I think. But if someone said to us, we don't want it to date, we'd say, well, you've probably come to the right architect.
Rachel Nolan:Yeah. Or I guess dating, give it some time, it turns turn turn turns into a sweeter word like nostalgia or something like that.
Dave Sharp:Saying data like, things dating is good is probably one of the most revolutionary things you can say in architecture. I feel like that is actually, like, very submitted too. Yeah. I guess so so you guys, again, having that interiors worldview, not to the point that it's, like, overtaken things at all, but just, like, having that different perspective. There's also, I suppose, a little bit of, snobbishness around interiors as well in in architecture.
Dave Sharp:And and I think, traditionally, it's kind of been looked down on a little bit. And I think maybe this kind of thing around dating and things going out of style, etcetera, or fashion feels like it's kind of connected to that a little bit.
Patrick Kennedy:Yeah. I think it's absolutely true. It gets treated as a sort of disposable, trivial surface. But, you know, the thing is about to Rachel's point about nostalgia, this is where ties into a a recurring interest we have in our practices, which is about engaging with memory or making things memorable. And so memory is about time, the passage of time.
Patrick Kennedy:So, you know, things like, particularly in interiors because they're they're so close to you, The touch of things, the color of things, the quality of light, the sound of things, even the smell of them, all of that stuff is really powerful. Humans have formed powerful relationships to interiors, I think. And, and if you try and sort of strip that out of a project to make it, you know, timeless, you're actually making something which is quite desolate. So I think, yeah, it's it is all tied in together, and we always see interiors as very much, a part of architecture. We really don't like to see that distinction because you experience architecture on the outside and in the inside, and every part of it is contributing to that experience.
Rachel Nolan:Yeah. It's like, I don't know. How how would you find we don't talk architecture language, but we talked an emotional language about those spaces. It's think of an interior being a bit like, everyone can kinda relate to music where you can be in a spot and you hear a piece of music and it completely transforms your whole experience in a car with a solo on, in a place that reminds you of that song. Like, an interior can kind of do that, I think.
Rachel Nolan:I think it's probably harder for the exterior of a building to do that. I think a garden can do that. But there isn't that emotional language around it. I think it's we've we've tried to talk about interiors more emotably with clients or with bigger clients as well. I think there's space for that.
Rachel Nolan:I think that is starting to happen. I mean, we certainly hear more talk about memory now than we had about 10 years ago. I mean, part of how we started practice was to talk about what we remembered as little kids, what first, in terms of Australian law, work of merchant builders, like, that that stuff that first hit us, we didn't have words for it, but we remembered it as being something special. So they're they're it's quite an emotional response to these things. And we and we try and keep find language for that.
Rachel Nolan:And and it's actually you have to have a bigger it's hard to find that language. We're not authors or poets. But I think to keep I mean, we haven't talked about imagination. I think that's a word that's not actually often used in our profession, but it's a bloody terrific thing to keep poking at, you know, just trying to imagine something else. Or So, you know, we try and keep that side alive in practice as much as we can.
Rachel Nolan:We're kind of sensitive about the way we talk about or inventive about talking about emotions as well.
Dave Sharp:I suppose over the period that the studio has been going over the last 25 years, have you seen, like, a big shift, I guess, in terms of the popularity of interior spaces, images of interiors, the interior world? I feel like people have gone crazy for it. Was that I don't know. I mean, that's always been an an area that people have been interested in, fascinated by buying magazines and things like that. But have you sort of seen that interest change over time?
Dave Sharp:Anything you've noticed about it?
Rachel Nolan:We all know why. I mean, social media is why. It's not
Patrick Kennedy:And not so economic development. Australia's it's a wealthy country. People can access this stuff now. They can do it. And it's you say it as Bryce pointed out, everything you look at, it's shown to you all the time on social media, on reality television, and so on.
Patrick Kennedy:So it's Yeah. You know, Australia used to be a country where we had lots of tariffs and, we did manufacturing and high everything was expensive. It's like, you know, you it wasn't possible to to dabble with interiors, whereas now it is. And and actually, the downside of it is that they've become very disposable and very trend based. But I guess the upside of it is there's a much greater visual literacy about what what your environment is.
Rachel Nolan:Yeah. I think it's interesting that you can typically, in editorial, tell what's Australian, even though you're stimulated from, you know, there's no boundaries on countries on social media, but we, you can usually tell an Australian job. I don't know. Know. When you when you look at an Australian job that doesn't look Australian, I always get really excited like he's done that.
Dave Sharp:You do see it occasionally, and it's surprising. And you find out it's in Bulgaria or something, and you're like, what?
Rachel Nolan:And but aren't you looking for that? Like, I feel like I'm looking for that. Like, how do I how do I not look at every shoot or every depiction of interior architecture or architecture that feels like you can touch it, and there'll be a product display on it. Like, that's that's kind of where where that that, like, Instagram, let's it's a big tool for in our world where it's starting to get lost and we're all getting close to not wanting to play anymore. But, you know, it it is kind of it can feel a little bit like an inventory of all the same things.
Rachel Nolan:So I'm I'm always surprised that we can all access everything easily through a medium like that, yet our staff here looks so cons so I can tell that's from here.
Dave Sharp:Yeah. Do you wanna just maybe speak to that a little bit more, Rachel, just particularly in terms of the media because I think that this, like, relates to a conversation around photography, choices around that, around the media, around styling of images and things like that. And this idea seeing the same things in every photo and have them having this kind of duplication that goes on where where everything's kind of looking kind of ubiquitous. And and what's your thoughts on that?
Rachel Nolan:I reckon that comes back for us to think about, like, even how our work is seen. Like, we all the people who help us make those images, our photographer, we work with Derek Swarwall a lot. Like, all the time we're talking with and collaborators like Amanda, Oliver, who we work with with landscape. All the time, we're like, okay. What can we all do differently together?
Rachel Nolan:I mean, I guess our world's become more to do with teams, how we work, because the practice has got bigger too. But, also, on all of those fronts, how can we try and push it or reimagine it, or you can see it in the photographic world, like, there is certain color. After 25 years, you know, there was a period there where everyone had kids in a shot. Then there's a certain lighting. Like, it can just come in, like, there's a there's a safety in kind of defaulting to those.
Rachel Nolan:And it's usually led because people have made interesting things, and then there's a follow. But all I guess all the time, we've we've just done 3 shoots recently. It's like, how do we I don't know. How do we do this a bit differently?
Patrick Kennedy:But it's just a it's another manifestation of, of the way media has changed the way we are now. I mean, it's it's another manifestation of an echo chamber. I mean, people do it with politics too. They just read the politics that they agree with. And same with, interior design.
Patrick Kennedy:It just it's self perpetuating. You're always looking at the things that the Internet tells you you wanna look at, and we're all we're all seeing. So, you know, we are both in fact, I think most of our clients are really curious about things which the Internet doesn't wanna show us. We wanna see what what else is there? What else is around?
Patrick Kennedy:But it's hard because you just kept getting fed Yeah. Something that responds to the last 10 things you looked at. Yeah. And It's
Rachel Nolan:it was also cool when it started. Like, there was there was this kind of it had potential and you could see it kind of change and I I think where it's landed if we're talking about Instagram, it feels like it's only feeding you what it wants to feed you. So maybe that's when the resistance starts to come towards it. But in the beginning it felt like a great little tool that you could muck around within the constraints of it and test things and be a little bit irreverent and whack things up. And we used it quite early days, and actually, you know, in its defense, it has made an incredible community of people, I think, that you be can become quite chatty with even within our in within our own profession.
Rachel Nolan:There's kind of voices there. There's some quite sweet things about it too. I think I shouldn't be too
Dave Sharp:Going back to the photography stuff just in terms of, like, the 3 shirts you've done recently, for example. When you're sitting with your collaborators and you're thinking about, let's try and do something differently this time, would that be different for each of those individual shoots? Or would that be talking about these broader sort of thoughts in terms of these 3 shirts we wanna try and focus more on? We are in the season of flowers on tables or so. You know, it's like whatever whatever.
Dave Sharp:Like, there is there kind of a theme that runs across the projects that you try and, like, tie them together with? Or is it like each project is a new opportunity to try something different, and we'll just kind of have this experimentation that's gonna go on through each shoot?
Rachel Nolan:Yeah. It's probably less to do with kind of decoration and more to do with if there is something to be captured in that shoot that helps us tell the story of what the project was. There was one we shot recently in North Fitzroy. It had been a really long, kind of sad parts of the story. We lost one of the clients, actually, died through it.
Rachel Nolan:But we kind of it was actually a really beautiful project to deliver for our client, who's just, like, the best woman ever. And but their interest in the garden and what when how we first met them and what they were growing. And typically, we would work with Amanda to deliver a garden. These guys, she delivered this. She went back and did the garden herself.
Rachel Nolan:We were like, we hadn't been back to see the house. So how and it was incredible, and very her, and very personal part of the story. And the way we shot that project was to really let that component of it sing, because it was like a little secret portrait, really. So that project was a particularly personal one, I think, to shoot, but it was important that we captured that. It was really lovely part of it.
Rachel Nolan:So the backstory of what the project we don't always have that, but the backstory of what the project's been, if we can somehow get that story in there is a really nice, you know, we know we're going to have to go on to, it goes into editorial. Those photos have to, they're there to support that story too.
Patrick Kennedy:I mean, architectural photography is interesting because it's almost like a separate discipline to the architecture because we do our work, and then it gets presented with the with the eye of someone else. So in our case, that's usually Derek. And, and we we're sort of very fascinated by that process because he also has his own evolution as a creative person. And so, often the change will come from Derek. So, you know, he'll have certain things he wants to achieve or things he has interesting to do with, you know, composition and lighting and, you know, and sort of narrative.
Patrick Kennedy:And that's really interesting for us too, because the architectural photography is not a mediated record of the building. It is it's another thing again, and it's actually not necessarily always about the building. It's actually about representing the building. And so that's just a really interesting process, I think, and to work with another creative person who thinks about these things a lot.
Dave Sharp:Yeah.
Rachel Nolan:And you know it's hard to control Derek. You've had him on the show.
Dave Sharp:He's out of control.
Rachel Nolan:We love him for that. But it's also architectural record is for lots of things. Yes? So the it's for conveying the story if we're presenting for awards, for instance. Not everything we photograph, we put in for awards.
Rachel Nolan:It's for, potentially, for editorial, outside of the practice. It's potentially for our own record or website, but it's also really important we get record of certain things, which we can show other clients to say this worked. And they they might not be hero shots. So that's always a bit of, a rumble on-site where he's like, I can't see that shot. I don't want that shot.
Rachel Nolan:It's like, get me that shot because I it's useful. It's gonna help me convince someone else in ask to convince someone else in practice, we need it on the record. So there's a whole lot of jobs that suite of photos can do. And having recently spoken to a lot of young people setting up practice, it's like, if you can and and we had no coin in the beginning to do this. And actually, a lot of our record of early projects, it's a real shame we didn't record them properly.
Rachel Nolan:We didn't have any money to do it, but it's worth it to somehow scratch around and find that money in practice for that record, because it's, you know, those images are really useful and invaluable.
Patrick Kennedy:I I mean, architectural representation, it's also part of the it actually captures another element of a building, which, like, a description or or being in the even being in the building doesn't give you. I mean, if you look at the, you know, tradition of architecture photography from the early 20th century, like, the ways that it was done, all of them actually send a different signal about some sort of other other sort of quality of that architecture. If you look at the really grainy black and white stuff from the sixties, it gives you a different sense of what that time was about and what those spaces felt like or sounded like. It's kinda it's kinda interesting. And you see it, like, an example of it now is a lot of photographers are using these really washed out palettes.
Patrick Kennedy:And it's it's actually about, trying to tell you about, a certain mood or atmosphere that these buildings are aspiring to as much as, the representation of it. So I think it it that's also a really fascinating thing about it. That it it's reflecting a certain time, which reflects a certain impetus.
Rachel Nolan:Which is tricky when you're working with color. That's where we're having,
Dave Sharp:Yeah.
Rachel Nolan:We have quite intensely colored projects, and you end up sitting with this kind of vibe of how they're shooting. Like, how can you be true to color? Color's the hardest thing to capture right to the project. I'm going back on what Pat was saying before. Like, always look at how powerful those photos are of super early modernist projects when they have a car in them.
Rachel Nolan:Like, you know, my kids will look at them and they think, oh, yeah. That's that's not weird. I'm going, look what the car was. Can you imagine how weird that building was as a consequence? You know, there's kind of virtually cranking cars in them.
Rachel Nolan:Like, how photos, you know, we've got photos in practice where, you know, everyone who there's lots of kids fit in photos, like just little things that become this kind of long practice record, which is actually quite sweet. We always think it's nice for the clients if they manage to squash a bit of a client activity in there for them to have it on record when they finish something as special as ours to themselves.
Dave Sharp:When I had Derek on the podcast, we did talk about the kind of the washed out sort of photography trend. Even though Derek doesn't really shoot that way, we were talking about it. He was saying he likes it, and, like, we're talking about why we like it because it's kind of bleak and apocalyptic. And for some reason, that kind of feels good, like, to see architecture in that sort of way for some reason. You hit the nail on the head, Rach, where it's like when our work is there's a lot of thought about color, that photography style just becomes like, you just can't reconcile it with the way that we're trying to show what the work how it feels.
Dave Sharp:Because I think that that photography style, it really marries well with, like, very neutral palette of concrete, timber, less objects in the photography, less furniture, like, really stripping things back seems to be what that style of photography tries to really enhance. I'm kind of glad that you guys didn't go down that direction with your project.
Patrick Kennedy:That captures a certain movement in arc the in interior design and architecture that was is pretty current. That palette, that's that's why it's succeeding. You know, in the past, architectural photography has been done in black and white. Do you know what I mean? So which captures a different thing as well.
Rachel Nolan:It it's gonna have to move fast. You'll watch it move fast in the next 2 years because there's color coming from every bloody angle at the moment. So that photography will have to adapt to that. And it's not just that. It's when you then, you you know, you're looking at images on your phone, or your iPad, or your computer, like, just getting those colors right, like, you know, it's that's all.
Dave Sharp:Yeah.
Rachel Nolan:Makes black and white seem so makes neutral projects seem so much easier, but the perception of color outside of the project itself, like, it's a interesting challenge. I wonder whether the tech will catch up with that. I
Dave Sharp:feel like you guys are gonna see the whole industry photography style just kinda, like, come back to where you were in the first place. Like, you'll be like, welcome back.
Rachel Nolan:We sound like 2 Methuselahs.
Dave Sharp:Yeah. We've been talking a lot about residential, but I think part of where you're at as a practice is thinking about the non residential work. And, also, when we're talking on the podcast about the challenges of making that transition from a brand image and reputation that's so tied up, almost typecast into residential as we touched on earlier to sort of make that move and have people rethink. When I think Kenny Nolan, I think 16 story hotel. I don't think house in Fitzroy North.
Dave Sharp:That's a challenge that you've been facing recently. What are your thoughts on the ways to kind of start to make that move happen? Is it just like the work comes out and then it comes out and people see it and that starts to adjust and edit their mental image of the practice?
Patrick Kennedy:It's look, it's a real challenge though because it's not normal in practice to, have such a diverse range of projects in the practice. It's it's not Not
Rachel Nolan:this size
Patrick Kennedy:of practice. Yeah. It's not common. So, people it doesn't suit the way people like to think about practices where where they like to put you into a into a dis a box. Like, you're the residential architect.
Patrick Kennedy:You're the interior designer. You do sports centers. You do swimming pools. You do apartment buildings. If you do a bit of everything, which is what we try to do, because we find re energizing in our practice, it actually is hard for people to understand who we are, and it might be a problem we can't really solve.
Patrick Kennedy:It might just be, it just might be something particular to our practice and that we just have different cohort cohorts that see us differently.
Dave Sharp:It is tricky. When I think about 2020 something person practices, I'd say they almost have to be across multiple sectors in a sense at at that level because I find that if you're just doing single residential exclusively, now there are many examples of practices that are able to scale to like, you said what you guys say that there are practices that can just solely focus on one sector because I feel like when I started out as a marketing person, obviously, you have this mantra of everyone should specialize and find a niche and become experts at it. But then you start to actually look at reality a bit more and go, well, actually,
Rachel Nolan:We wouldn't have done that.
Patrick Kennedy:No. But in most practices that get to that scale just jettison the residential. It just doesn't stay with them. So they're doing a diverse range of projects. They still have got diversity, but they're not doing the residential.
Patrick Kennedy:And then, you know, the thing is the tension is, I think, is that residential is the one that gets the most publicity. It's the most visible.
Rachel Nolan:And we like it.
Patrick Kennedy:And we do like it. So it actually ends up defining you. If you do it, it defines you because it's what gets pushed out. But if you're a practicing, you know, 20 something practice, most of them are jettisoning the residential. And so then, therefore, it's not defining them.
Patrick Kennedy:I guess that's probably a clear way to say what I was trying to say.
Dave Sharp:Pretty risky to jettison the residential. Like, I work with clients that they decide it's time to push into public, and then they push from 0 to a100. They don't want any residential stuff counteracting the work they're trying to do to create the perception that they are a more public oriented practice. But I think if you do that too quickly, you kind of chop the legs off your business' marketing and popularity and visibility if you just go like, okay, we've got a couple of these projects on. Time to just stop the presses on all the residential imagery.
Dave Sharp:No more houses on Instagram. It has to be a gradual transition. Right? You can't just overnight decide, nah, it's it's out.
Rachel Nolan:Completely agree. Completely agree. But it's also and we we talk about this to people, is that we call our residential part of the practice. I mean, we we enjoy it a lot. You make great you make great relationships in it.
Rachel Nolan:You're delivering something incredibly personal, over quite a long period of time. But we can test ideas in residential architecture that we can talk with confidence in other areas, like when we're delivering a primary school, or we're working on a community centre. Like, they're not they're all for people. So, you know, when we talk about imagination or testing ideas, they're beautiful they can be beautiful incubators, and that's not for future clients to think we're testing their, you know, their guinea pigs. It's not we know how to do it.
Rachel Nolan:We've been doing it for a long time. But but they but there are it's a beautiful little laboratory, that area. And,
Patrick Kennedy:And it's relevant because ever everyone well, not everyone, but, you know, wish were everyone lived somewhere.
Rachel Nolan:Yeah.
Patrick Kennedy:So we all we all experience domestic space. We all understand it. So it's actually relevant to every type of building.
Rachel Nolan:Absolutely.
Dave Sharp:I always enjoy talking to practices about things that they're finding difficult even when they're in a great position with their practice. They're doing great, but they're still going, but the thing that we're currently focused on is hard, and we're not sure how to do it. I love hearing that sort of stuff. And I feel like that adjusting and updating and articulating that message that you've been talking about, the language, the way that you're sort of framing the work that you do, that's all seems to be part of it. I wonder, are there any other future sort of plans for the practice in terms of looking ahead?
Dave Sharp:Where are you guys interested in taking things with with Kennedy and Nolan? Are there any big plans?
Patrick Kennedy:World domination.
Rachel Nolan:Would you read my mind?
Dave Sharp:Any any world domination we can talk about and get this scoop on?
Rachel Nolan:I might do suburb domination.
Patrick Kennedy:I think what we wanna do is just continue on this trajectory where whereby we can where it's diverse. It's still always diverse, and it's still grounded in so we'll always do residential work. We'll always be really concerned with, relationship with landscape. We'll always insist on doing the interiors. But we wanna try different projects.
Patrick Kennedy:So at the moment, we've, we're working on a humidity, building and urban design, in, the northern suburbs of Melbourne. And we just love this project because it's just a completely it's just testing us at whole new areas, and we're we're learning so much. But that doesn't mean we mean we wanna do 10 more of them. We wanna we wanna continually find new challenges, I think, with That's true.
Rachel Nolan:We're working on that project from Meribec with, Mark Shakes of OpenWork and Ross from Tiny Infinity. And we went to to win that project. We went together as a team. Now it wasn't just K-nine consultants. And I guess those relationships in practice, not just in Melbourne, like there might be relationships that sit outside of Melbourne, where we're actually getting to work with peers who are interesting and are looking at the world in a careful way, responsible way.
Rachel Nolan:There's no we need to do that socially, environmentally. I think that there's a big part of our practice that will utilize that, so it's not always just in house anymore. We know with any projects, when you get together as a team that get along, it's just it's so much more pleasant than the opposite outcome. So I I guess in practice, if we can really aim to build those teams, we've got people in here who understand that. Toreen and Mark are particularly good at that, is how you you set something up that's got the potential to be terrific from the go get because it's hard.
Rachel Nolan:There's lots of fights. There's lots of regulations now. It's a real schlep to the end these days. So the strength in that team and those people that we've befriended along the way, and that we respect enormously for their thinking, that makes practice feel really exciting, I think, with what's coming.
Patrick Kennedy:I absolutely agree. I mean, the collaboration is just a wonderful evolution. And I think the other other side to it is that we're a practice of 26 architects. It actually suits us very well. We're in this beautiful Paul Cooch design building.
Patrick Kennedy:We we can't really expand. We don't really want to expand. It's it feels like this is a kind of a good size for us. But if we can collaborate, it actually gives us access to a whole other types of projects. So the it's also that as well as the relationships, the mental stimulation, intellectual stimulation.
Patrick Kennedy:So
Rachel Nolan:And we just have to learn in this profession or in this world, we have to learn more all the time. You never never get to a point in practice you're like, I've learned it. Let's go. I know how to do this. It feels like there's more to learn all the time, which is actually pretty freaking overwhelming, to be honest.
Rachel Nolan:But we have to at at this age, in practice, that we are we don't have we know now that we don't have to know everything. We've got lots of people who know those things and really kind of almost relax into that acceptance in a way, but there does seem to be an urgency. I mean, we we talked earlier about, you know, being nimble with imagination and making new things that look different, blah blah blah, whatever that is. But we have to learn about all this new stuff that with it's important. We've got a lot of responsibility in built world to do that coming up and to and to work with to encourage our people who work for us to really push and learn through that when maybe we're not as great at
Patrick Kennedy:learning
Rachel Nolan:anymore.
Patrick Kennedy:Well, exactly.
Rachel Nolan:Yeah. So I I think there's a responsibility, but there's a huge I feel quite quite pumped about that. Getting to this point in practice to feel like, you know, we've got a whole lot of other peers in different professions who are talking about retirement and man, we're not thinking, we can't think like that. We're like, you know, we've got this opportunity after 25 years maybe to get our mitts on some really great projects. So it's not about, you know, fading out and working out how to work less, it's about what are the good things we can get to do in the next bit.
Patrick Kennedy:Well, it's you know, you're still a young architect. You're still called a young architect well, well into your forties. Oh, wow. We're we're past that. But what I'm saying is that actually, the practice the the practice of architecture has a lot of longevity.
Patrick Kennedy:And in fact, it actually you start to hit your straps as you get older. You got a few runs under the on the scoreboard. So I think for us, it's it's an exciting time. We'd we'd sort of have a probably different role in it, but it's an exciting time. We're finally getting to to try some more more stuff.
Rachel Nolan:I'm thinking maybe the only way we can do that is with, like, I don't know, a 40 minute nap every afternoon.
Dave Sharp:That will help you last well into your eighties.
Rachel Nolan:We laugh, Dave. That might be true.
Dave Sharp:It's interesting to hear you guys talking about the exciting optimism of kind of going into this new realm of projects. It's like that kind of almost got that new practice sort of frightened optimism to it by the sounds of listening to you guys. You've taken some time to get to this point with the practice where you wanted to go in this direction. Whereas I see some architects that are kind of thinking that they need to start moving up to those bigger projects within, like, year 2, year 3. Otherwise, what are they doing?
Dave Sharp:Just interested in your perspective about playing the longer game, not being too impatient in practice, I suppose. I get this impression that you guys are playing that longer term game and and not rushing.
Rachel Nolan:I don't know how you make it manifest it just by rushing anyway. How would you get it?
Patrick Kennedy:Well, listen, there are a few opportunities for when we were a younger practice. Now now there actually are pathways. Like, you know, the New South Wales government provides pathways for emerging practice in all the major major projects there. And there's a lot of focus on emerging architects, which is terrific because there's so much energy in emerging practice.
Rachel Nolan:Education shouldn't stop. You're not just spat out from university. It's like a way for the profession to educate the younger ones coming through, which it's it happens pretty fast. Like, Thailand goes pretty quickly. So you can you you know, but you'll learn you'll learn a bit of practice after to 25 years where you can look at that model and it makes sense.
Rachel Nolan:It's good for it's good for our cities.
Dave Sharp:So you're talking about in terms of those partnerships between emerging and more bigger and more established ones?
Patrick Kennedy:Well, that's that's one one aspect of it. And the other is that there's just been, you know, I mean, there's been an explosion in in construction in our country the last 30 years, and so it's just a lot of work to feed young practice, or it has been. So it's it's provided a lot of opportunities. I guess when we started, it was pretty, it was pretty bare sort of covered out there in terms of work, but that's alright. It meant that we could grow at a slow pace, which probably suited our personalities.
Rachel Nolan:Yeah. Balwa, I guess we're all practicing in silos too. Like, how do we know what else was going on in bigger practice? There was actually no portal in to see how that was working. And I think going back to the social media or just being online, you actually can understand a little bit about how practice works, not just the projects they make these days.
Rachel Nolan:And when we started, there was that was an
Dave Sharp:impossible thing to do. Office talk podcast back then.
Rachel Nolan:There was no Dave asking you questions like this.
Dave Sharp:There was not.
Rachel Nolan:Listening at home.
Dave Sharp:Digging around for interesting nuggets. Yeah. Why is it happening?
Rachel Nolan:Like, how how did you do that? You know? It was, like, funny magic tape, masking tape, and T squares. We just wasn't it wasn't around. We had to fax.
Rachel Nolan:We had to fax.
Dave Sharp:To fax someone. Who are you faxing? A fax volcano.
Rachel Nolan:I I'll tell you a great little story, though. I worked at a practice where someone there was other there were builders sharing the building, and someone owed the money. And they used to go down to the fax machine and put the message on a loop and full and sticky tape it into a full loop. So at the other end, the person just had limitless amounts of faxes. It was like, you know, it was like fax terrorism.
Dave Sharp:Blocking out their fax machine with, like, the same invoice on a loop. Yeah.
Rachel Nolan:I wanna do that.
Dave Sharp:Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it.
Patrick Kennedy:Good on you, Donnie.
Rachel Nolan:We've just done some professional development with each other in that time. Thank you. Terrific.
Dave Sharp:That was my conversation with Patrick Kennedy and Rachel Nolan of Kennedy Nolan. If you'd like to learn more about their studio, you can visit kennedynolan.com.au or follow them on Instagram at kennedy_nolan. Office Talk is supported by Office Dave Sharp, a strategic marketing and brand definition practice for architecture. Our practice works collaboratively with clients across the globe. So to learn more about our process and book a consultation to discuss your practice, simply visit officedavesharpe.com.
Dave Sharp:Today's episode of Office Talk was edited and engineered by Anthony Richardson of Simple Dwelling Studio.
