TBR INTERVIEW

TBR: Have you always had a love of architecture?

BG: I grew up in a family where my parents renovated, so from as early as I can remember, I was carrying bricks and things between houses. My mother was also very creative.

I was lucky enough to go to a good school and get the entry score I needed [for architecture]. I had a teacher intervene, a headmaster, in my last year and say to me, ‘What are you doing, doing chemistry and physics? Why aren't you doing art and tech?’

And it was probably the best advice the headmaster gave me because then, when I got to university, I wasn't like a lot of the students who didn't do enough art or creative subjects before they got to university.

Now, I'm seeing it firsthand with the students we have at our practice. They're almost engineering-oriented when they start architecture. Then, at university, - whilst I am not a big advocate for the university process - it does break them down to get the creative side of their brain working.

TBR: Do you have a specific design process?

BG: I've done this long enough that it's almost like, if I can go to site early on, it's as though the site tells you the answer.

If you listen to your client and you have those values, the first perception, I find, is generally pretty close to right.

Every site tells a different story.

TBR: Do you approach every project individually and how important is the relationship with the client and also the builder?

BG: Very. I'm still learning from my clients. We meet some really clever people in their own fields and you've got to move and adapt to your client base. You'd be really naive to think you can treat every client the same.

We're also very, very lucky that we have a strong relationship with a core group of builders, probably about five or six companies.

Compared to when I was a young architect, a lot of architects aren't spending as much time during the construction process, helping a client through it or helping the builder get through it.

In the last four years, I have really seen the most significant change in the industry since I started.

TBR: Would you also say, then, that the last few years have been some of the most challenging times of your career?

BG: Yes. During the GFC, it just got quiet. Everyone stopped. The world was a mess. This time, you heard the saying ‘it's a profitless boom’ and the profit boom is the problem. So everyone's coming out of Covid. Everyone ran around like chooks with their heads cut off, efficiency went and so, to a point, did work ethic.

People weren't making the profit they should have made considering how the market was because the market kept running up with it. So, a builder might think he's put a fair margin on, but then escalation destroys his income and he rolls into the next job unhappy because the last one maybe didn't make any money.

We had a builder decide to close his building company post-Covid. He paid the subcontractors and decided to close his business.

At that point, we had a meeting with six or seven of our favourite builders in our boardroom and had a chat about how to get this back on track for our clients because this risk profile couldn’t keep happening.

The builders participated in it and gave us their advice and we listened. It now means we've got these projects where, going back to your question, we have to be the most adaptable we've ever had to be because we run contracts for our clients.

We don't just draw it and go, ‘Here's some drawings. Go and meet the builder.’ We literally introduce them, tender it, run the contract, and we are there when they get the keys at the end. So it's halfway to being a project manager as well as being the architect. But when I first started, that's what architects did.

TBR: Whom or what inspires you creatively?

BG: I'll tell you what doesn't! If you want a Pinterest house that is today's fashion, don't come to BGD.

My mother was in fashion, so I use the analogy of a good blue suit. As a guy, I can go and buy a good blue suit with three buttons and it'll last me 15 years.

At BGD, we aim for a good blue suit analogy, which is quality, honest materials and proper proportions. It basically comes down to quality that will stand the test of time.

We have houses that are still setting local area records that are 10 and 15 years-old.

I also think there’s some really good work coming out of Brazil and South America. The younger architects out of Singapore are also very clever. 

TBR: Do you like to work with timeless materials such as hardwood and travertine?

BG: One hundred percent. Travertine is amazing to work with.

Timber floors are an interesting one. If you'd asked me 10 years ago, if I’d use an engineered timber floor, I would have said no. Today, with the quality of those materials, we're using them a lot.

One of the biggest reasons is they don't move. You could leave a house or a unit locked up for three months and go away and come back and the timber floor is exactly how you left it.

TBR: You design homes in beautiful locations such as Mermaid Beach, Burleigh Heads and Byron Bay. How much are your designs connected to place?

BG: You've got to respond to where you are. You've got to respond to the way your client interacts with the community.

A personal journey was that we lived in a suburb here on the Gold Coast for nearly 20 years. Then, after me begging and praying, we got to move to the beach, which is where a lot of our work was.

I knew what to expect but it freaked my wife out because she went from very much a six foot fence suburb to a suburb where people are out and about and talked to each other. People knew the name of the dog around the corner or the kids. It was much more social to the point where my wife was almost puzzled with it at the start.

So what I'm getting at is in Mermaid, the lifestyle is important. The scale of the house is less important because they spend more time out.

TBR: Would you like to see more village-style living on the Gold Coast?

BG: Yes! I would love to see the Gold Coast become more like villages. Personally, I've been hoping for 20 years that we would have an urban renewal and the urban sprawl would stop and we’d do what more mature cities do.

We've actually got involved with two of our partners and bought some commercial land at Nobbys Beach where we're going try and build a cooler way to go to work.

It’s exciting. We could have bought that land anywhere, but we chose to try and build on this village thing..