Inside Shaun Lockyer’s Brisbane Home and Office

Buying the block to moving in took five years. There were two years of playing with the design and getting the development application approved, then a pause while Covid hit and the kids left home, then six to eight months of intensive design and a 19 month build with M2. They moved in on 6 December 2025.

The delay bought headspace, and the means to build it the way they wanted.

“This wasn't about finding the cheapest price. It wasn't about finding somebody that could do the job. It was really about finding somebody that was passionately invested in wanting to do it with us.”

He calls it the house of surprises. The first is on the front door. The handles are a pair of timber hands, a homage to Le Corbusier's Open Hand monument at Chandigarh, a hand about unity and coming together.

Inside, the entrance hall is double height, which you don't expect from a house this size. It is one of the few introverted rooms, the step between the harder street edge and the green beyond it. It is also where the art starts. A canvas by Bundit Puangthong, the Melbourne Thai street artist. CJ Hendry's flowers. A sculpture by Jake Walker, a young New Zealander whose father was a prominent architect.

Then there's the door to the garage. Left open, it puts the back of the 911 on show from the hall. “Completely childish,” he says, “but it brings me a lot of joy. That door can close so it doesn't irritate my wife.”

The house is one narrow wing wrapped around a small courtyard. On a spring morning the doors slide away and the kitchen, the dining table and the couch are all sitting in a garden. The green stone on the island bench is a homage to Mies van der Rohe and the Barcelona Pavilion, and one more way of getting green into the room.

His favourite corner is on the north-west. There is a second courtyard there, 800 millimetres deep, with plants that cascade onto the couch. Behind it is the pocket park and its fig tree, which they floodlight at night.

Outside, a built-in timber seat runs along the deck. Barney, one of the lead carpenters from M2, made it right at the end of the project. It is a homage to Donovan Hill, whose work shaped Lockyer's own when he arrived in Queensland as a young architect, and still does.

In 1991, as a uni student, Lockyer went to Europe to look at Le Corbusier's buildings. In Marseille, cast into the wall of the Unité d'Habitation, he saw the Modulor Man, the figure Corbusier built on the golden mean. The same figure is now cast into the concrete at home. A reminder, he says, of his roots.

Years ago he went to Helsinki to see Alvar Aalto's work. Aalto is also known for a glass vase that Iittala still makes. Lockyer took the vase, cut it in section and turned the outline into a backlit mirror. Corbusier's and Aalto's light fittings run through the rest of the house.

Upstairs, the corridor between the kids' bedrooms and the main bedroom gets its own skylights and two of the couple's favourite paintings. The study is set up as a study and he doesn't work in it. The office is too close. Julie uses it. He keeps his model cars in there, and the film cameras he had as a kid, which he has started collecting again.

You reach the main bedroom through the ensuite. Green tile, a skylight over the shower, and a big open window where the garden spills into the bathroom. Then the room they call The Retreat, used for meditation, stretching, yoga and sometimes painting. And the bedroom itself, on the last corner of the house, under a raised oak ceiling, with a view over Newstead. On a good day the whole corner is open to the fig tree.

The office is 670 metres away and most days he walks. Today the 911 is going to The Stable to be detailed, so he drives. The route runs through Teneriffe and New Farm, where he has designed about 30 houses, three of them in one street. Then down into Fortitude Valley, past the Calile and one of the regular coffee shops.

“Like all good architects, coffee is at the centre of our existence.”

At The Stable he hands over the keys and apologises for the state of the car. He took it up Mount Glorious on the weekend. “She's absolutely filthy, but it's all good. It's proper dirt. It's proper driven dirt.”

The studio is an old Queenslander with towers on every side. The practice bought it nine years ago, raised it and built in underneath. Back then there were 10 or 12 of them, with an advertising agency and one of their builders as tenants. The tenants went. For a while the team was split across two floors, and he felt he was losing touch with people, so everybody moved upstairs and the meeting rooms came down.

Nobody works in teams, because nearly everyone is on a house of their own. Catherine sits at the front and, in his words, runs his life. The library is in the new part of the building, architecture books with a few Porsche ones among them. The coffee machine runs 24/7.

“Architecture, for me, was a conscious decision to not be an accountant.” His brothers, uncles and aunties were all accountants, and it was the furthest thing from that he could find.

He started out in South Africa, moved to Brisbane with Julie at the beginning of 2000 and spent nine and a half years at Arkhefield, working on apartments and public buildings as well as houses. The houses were the part he loved. In 2009, at the peak of the global financial crisis (“of course, a great time to start a practice”), he set up on his own with Lucy Hyndman, who has now worked with him, on and off, for nearly 22 years.

When they first arrived he and Julie stayed in New Farm and walked the streets with a baby not yet two, guessing that one day he might have a practice there of four or five people. Twenty-six years on there are 24 or 25. They have finished three or four houses in Sydney and 14 on Stradbroke Island, and are on their 34th project in Noosa. “There's a constant sense of awe of how the hell did this all happen?”

When you start a practice, he says, there's an element of desperation. You do a bit of anything to pay the bills and get known. Then come the questions that take years to answer. How big to be. How many people. Which clients. Local or national. And the whole time the grass looks greener. “You're always looking at everyone else going, is this more interesting than that?”

“Now, at the age of 55, I feel like we know who we are, we know what we're about, what we offer.”

What's left is the harder part. Keeping every day fresh. Pitching up to work with new energy. Being the example to staff, clients and builders that he'd want from somebody else, and a mentor to younger architects the way others were to him. The name on the door, he says, now stands for a lot more than him.