Day in the Life Nat Cheshire

NAT CHESHIRE IS THE DESIGNER AND ARCHITECT BEHIND SOME OF AUCKLAND CITY’ S MOST CHARACTER-DEFINING DEVELOPMENTS, SUCH AS CITY WORKS DEPOT AND MUCH OF BRIT OMART. He runs Cheshire Architects alongside his father and founding principal of the firm, Pip Cheshire. Here's how he gets through the day, organises his time and manages a trans-disciplinary practice.

What time do you wake up?

It varies wildly, from 2am to 6am. Increasingly I get up with my little daughter, Florence, whenever she wakes.

What kind of work do you do?

I help run a studio of thirty extraordinary designers and architects who reshape big chunks of city and design tiny burnt hinterland cabins, design light fittings and teaspoons, speak, write, and do all we can to forge a better city, culture and future.

What’s the ideal way to start your day?

5am. Darkness. Drive. Meet a truck and an old friend on an empty roadside. Mountains. Bush. Running in darkness and cold and preferably rain and high wind and with rivers. It sounds masochistic, but it’s so profoundly different from a warm shower and a coffee and an iPhone, and a privilege.

Do you have any morning rituals?

Ritual is impossible. The closest thing I have at the moment is standing still under a cold shower. That, and getting my daughter up, or comforting her if she wakes too early to rise.

How soon do you begin doing work-related things each morning, such as checking your phone or emails?

Once Florence is ensconced with toast and her mummy, immediately. It’s a river. I hop out of that river for a period most evenings, and whenever I’m with her. Otherwise being in that river is what buys me fluidity and a strange kind of freedom.

What’s your media consumption or interaction like – which podcasts, radio, videos, books, magazines, and news sites do you read or listen to?

Almost none. I used to consume media voraciously, but I have long since removed it. My studio life demands the continuous vomiting out of ideas, provocations, critique and solutions. When I come to eat, I need substance. It’s like cooking dinner versus eating a muesli bar. I cook: I read as deeply as I can, rather than broadly; spend time with a very few but precious artworks in my mind

– I do not own them – and talk and listen to those people I find most exciting.

What do you think is unique about the way you approach your work?

I think it is perhaps the things that we stand against that define what our endeavour stands for. We just confront complex systems, draw from them their most potent opportunities and problems, synthesise of those complexities a singular vision, tell the story of that vision in such a way as to galvanise its varied and conflicted stakeholders to its cause, then set about bringing it into existence in the world. There is no room for aesthetic, typological, economic or disciplinary niches here: we fight continuously to keep these at bay. That’s probably a little unusual. Most people have a product to sell. We just have a process.

What responsibility do you have in a typical day? What takes up most of your time?

Almost all I do is talk. My responsibilities are to those people who have entrusted parts of their lives to me – be they our team working night and day to make of the prosaic the extraordinary, our clients entrusting us with their capital and their dreams, my family and friends with the hopes and fears and delight and sadness, my city and my people who may not have a voice at the table but who will live centuries with the implications of our work. These are privileges that I am grateful to carry.

Where do your best ideas come from?

I don’t think I have any ideas. I think I just synthesise convictions out of the ideas of those brilliant people who surround me, and the complexities of the environment in which we work. The ideas tend to exist already, at least in part. Our studio sifts through thousands in order to discover the most interesting ones, and collides them until they stick together in ways we think to be potent – exponential.

What does inspiration look like for you?

I never understood inspiration. I know hard work and I know the adrenaline that rises out of revealing through that work the possibility of making for our people something extraordinary and which has never existed before… that breathlessness of needing urgently to bring it into the world for people to live with, to contaminate the city, to challenge the culture, to make a tiny dent in the future… before its potential is exhausted, the opportunity snuffed out, and the thing relegated to a few lines on a sheet of paper at the bottom of a recycling bin.

What do you think New Zealand is like as a conducive environment for creativity?

We are small and agile and increasingly – almost surprisingly – brave. Our smallness used to seem a burden. The thing that might prevent us from doing things. In the 21st century, our smallness feels enabling; an accelerator. We know each other, we collide all the time – often with zero regard for hierarchy. Our appetite for an informal kind of excellence encourages experimentation and lowers the threshold of participation, we adopt early and abandon early, and we live lives of urbanity and wilderness. But we have a disgusting polarity of privilege and empowerment that is defined by race and by wealth and by the two of those things mixed together. And we are thrashing our wilderness and our land. And we are getting worse not better. If I am optimistic, it is only that we may now deploy all of those advantages of our scale to assault the disadvantages of our people. That is the challenge of my generation. So far I have done nothing.

What do you think it is about your nature, habits or interests that makes you creative?

I don’t think I am creative. Only focused.

Is there an ethos or motto you abide by in your work?

Do not rest. Except when with your children. But they won’t let you rest anyway. Not if they’re like wonderful, wild little Florence.

Do you work a lot? Would you say you have an obsessive part to your personality?

Are you kidding.

What kind of breaks do you take throughout the day?

What do you mean.

What’s the most enjoyable part of your day?

I haven’t yet worked out ‘enjoyable’. But in amongst it all I have little moments of feeling very, very lucky.

Do you procrastinate? Is it good or bad?

I have spent a long time doing so. Most of my life. I gave a talk several years ago – my most valued such opportunity yet – for which I had a year to prepare. I wrote it in one continuous stream spanning the final 32-hours, showered, and walked on stage to deliver it. If I have done anything worthwhile, it has often started in this mode. But it is not sustainable. It is the behaviour of a start-up, a studio in its nascent fragile form. Now we wield hundreds of millions of dollars and we are building things we first sketched a decade ago. Procrastination is often wasteful and dangerous in this environment. It requires discipline. Our energy is drawn instead from the magnitude of our opportunities, and our resolve in not squandering the potential they represent.

What’s your interaction with friends and family throughout the day? Can you be both a successful entrepreneur and a good father, partner and friend?

I was not. I fell asleep at dinner tables, in the middle of conversations, on friend’s floors. I was younger then, but it still cost my wife Lizzie a large portion of her husband. That was not fair to her. I was a loving friend whose rare presence was masked by fear or obsession or some mixture of both. But I was so privileged. I stood on the shoulders of giants, while the children I once shared a schoolyard with never stood a chance. I did not wish to insult that privilege in its squandering, and the world felt just…wide open. Now it is different. The studio is a decade older and powerful in its own right. I spend almost as much time with Florence as Lizzie does. The work is more strategic. And if I need to work, I do it when they sleep. I have few friends, love them fiercely, and give to them all I can.

Do you get stressed? If so, how do you manage it?

Increasingly I feel only pressure, not stress. I am in a protracted experiment with mindfulness. But running over mountain ranges in the driving snow has a way of focusing the mind that no amount of stationary breathing has yet equaled.

What do you do once you get home? Can you switch off?

I run around and around the dining table chasing or being chased by Florence, walk up to the little corner park with her on my shoulders catching leaves from the trees we pass, or cook and serve a little wooden dinner from her little wooden kitchen. Then Florence and I bath together, dress her in her tiny pyjamas, and read books to each other, before eventually kissing goodnight. Although recently she has begun declining a bedtime kiss on the basis that ‘it’s a special treat daddy’. Sigh. I prepare dinner. Lizzie and I will watch something together before I peel off and re-enter the river. It’s a precious hour or so.

What do or don’t you eat or drink to maintain your performance throughout the day?

I don’t really No uppers, no downers. Not dogmatically, because I adore alcohol and caffeine and fall into their arms on rare and wonderful occasions. But I just can’t sustain this endeavour with any kind of volatility in my energy reserves. Running very long distances is a good teacher of this.

What time do you go to sleep? Do you have any special techniques for a good night’s rest?

I really am the worst person to ask about this. I urge you to sleep better than me.