PROFILE: SUE CARR
The results speak for themselves for the principal of this elite Australian architecture practice
Sue Carr is the founder and principal of the award-winning Carr, a 60-strong Melbourne-based interior and architecture practice celebrating 26 years of quietly challenging the conventional. Here, she explains her motivations and inspirations. I’ve always been driven by change. I’m not interested in the status quo. When I started out, I studied science and ended up in architecture school. I was interested in interior design because it was brand spanking new. I didn’t know what it was but it was different, and that’s why I didn’t follow an architectural degree at the time. I’m constantly looking to the future. I always seek better ways of doing things and how to plan better spaces. I enjoy emphasising the intangible, like the way light falls and framing views to landscape. Melbourne inspires me. Melbourne Square, a new precinct in the heart of the city combining parklands and retail with apartments and penthouses, is one of our most exciting recent projects. The brief was to reflect what Melbourne is. It’s one of the fastest-growing cities in Australia. It’s a dynamic place. It’s international, it’s creative, and we wanted to reflect that in the interior design, with pleated walls, pleated mosaics and a sculptural materiality using the elegance of marble and rich timbers. This brings a textural quality to the spaces. The internal experience is also a reflection of the building’s architectural form. Modern life is a blur. The biggest change in how we live is that work is becoming more like home, hotels are becoming more like home and home is becoming more like a workplace. Even though we divide our business into sectors of workplace, hospitality and residential, all these activities are blurring. I understand our growing pains. Debate is raging about housing affordability and its impact on our living spaces. The move of many people to apartments because no one can afford houses; the idea of co-living and being happy with it because Melbourne’s population is set to grow to eight million in a few years, which is enormous. There is also the increase in migration from rural areas to cities and millennials staying at home for longer. How do we make this look in the future? It’s all about being different. One of our greatest challenges is that we never want to design interiors that appeal to the fashion of the time. What we do is all about good design having the power to make a positive difference, and we continue to rebel against fads and trends. Our spaces must work harder. Gone is the separate study. Why do we need it when we can sit on the sofa and work — and we can work from anywhere? The dining room has also gone. The hub of our home is now our kitchen, our island bench — the family’s working hub. Design is a balancing act. When it comes to our design approach, the adjectives we like to use are considered, refined, authentic, engaging, enduring. The enduring quality of our work is what we’re about but we’re also forward-thinking. Education is everything. I travel a lot. The whole team is out there all the time, researching. We experience the world, understand technology, design, social sciences, and are influenced by the fine arts. We have regular workshops to share our experiences. Educating our team to know about ideas is the way to stay ahead of everyone else.