Iwan Sunito
CEO and co-founder, Crown Group
WHAT HE’S KNOWN FOR: Since co-founding Crown Group in 1996, Iwan Sunito’s vision has evolved into building resort-style living apartments, often in less-trendy locations. Crown Group’s seven-tower, 653-apartment Top Ryde City Living development in Sydney won the 2014 Urban Development Institute of Australia National Award for Excellence for High Density Housing. The residential section of the new 29-storey V by Crown Group complex in Parramatta opened in March, while its hotel, retail outlets and rooftop bar are due to open progressively through 2017. The group has $4.8 billion worth of developments in the pipeline in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Indonesia.
WHERE HE CAME FROM: “My dad was in the building business, making ironbark shingles for roofs in Kalimantan [in Indonesian Borneo]. Then I went to Surabaya and lived with my grandfather, who specialised in antique Chinese furniture. I grew up smelling, touching and looking at the ways things were being made for the home.” From early in his life, Sunito says he had his eye on design and entrepreneurship, because in Indonesia “life can be quite hard if you work for somebody else”. Although he had the choice to study aeronautical engineering or architecture,
“I thought, ‘If I’m going to start my own business one day, it makes more sense to do architecture.’” He studied at the University of NSW and, after graduating in 1991, did his Master of Construction Management, “which opened my thinking to the more practical sides of the building game”. Sunito says American architect-turned-developer John C. Portman, famed for introducing soaring atriums in hotels, was an early inspiration: “I look at him as somebody who successfully crossed over from the architectural world into the property development world.”
WHAT HE WANTS TO ACHIEVE: “More than 55 per cent of people in the world are living in cities and the [estimate] is 75 per cent by 2050. We want to create iconic buildings... and we’re bringing resort-style living into our developments. The boundaries between private space and public space are diminishing, and community spaces – libraries, rooftops, pools, movie theatres – are important aspects of our developments. Also important in our buildings is a sense of journey. You meander, you reach a section of the building and go, ‘Wow’ then you turn around and see another thing.”
WHAT’S HE’S LEARNT: “I do have a building – that I don’t want to name and don’t want to see again! – from the early days. We haggled with the builder about the balcony; we compromised by cutting it shorter and the building just looks bad. It’s small things that make a building complete. We want our customers to be impressed with the result and say, ‘This is the best building I’ve ever lived in.’”
WHAT HE BELIEVES: “The way that people live is changing rapidly and a lot of buildings are being constructed to satisfy the standard of the building code without really thinking about the needs of people. You have to give them amenities where they can commune with friends and meet with people outside their private space. Many buildings are not catering for the future. For instance, they’re not catering for the Airbnb world, or the car park hasn’t been designed to take into account the fact that more and more people are sharing cars. A good city is a living city. A proper halfway balance between having enough jobs – preserving the commercial space – and allowing residential development is important.”