We (Tahnee & Christopher) met while studying architecture at the University of Queensland. After relatively short stints working in larger offices, we each spent a number of formative years working for smaller, highly focussed architecture practices with strong design reputations, where the directors were each personally involved with every client and design output. These were motivating experiences and helped to confirm a broad template for the type and scale of practice we would eventually envisage leading ourselves.

Our shared design sensibilities, complimentary project experience and desire to direct our own projects and practice led us to establishing Sullivan Skinner. We are based in Meanjin/Brisbane on the lands of the Turrbal and Yuggera people.

Our work is underpinned by those fundamental qualities of space with enduring appeal; volume, proportion, material and light. By pursuing a reciprocity between building, landscape and interior, our work is informed by and responsive to our subtropical context. We tend towards an understated architecture with minimal embellishment that prioritises user comfort and the practicalities and pleasure of use.

We are comfortable with the position that these seemingly ordinary concepts are, in fact, the wellspring of architecture and so long as architecture is about the use and experience of physical spaces, our interest in them will be sustained.

Photography: David Chatfield