Carr Design Group, Melbourne: Collaborative, Engaging, Inventive.

Carr Design Group was established in Melbourne more than 40 years ago and remains one of Australia’s most sought-after design firms working on projects ranging from offices and hotels to residential. 

Working within an historic warehouse style building, the studio has access to daylight and natural ventilation on all four sides, a rare commodity in the dense urban fabric of Melbourne’s prime dining hub of Flinders lane. Directors Chris McCue and Dan Cox describe the office environment as a creative studio where all team members work together in project-based clusters, flexibly arranged as projects move through different stages of design and resource requirement. 

The open studio was a plan first initiated by practice Founder and Principal Sue Carr, an important aspect of team learning and exposure to projects within the studio, enabling open discussion and engagement. 

The pair remark that “as the studio has enlarged through the scale and complexity of the work increasing, the portfolio expanded and diversified, the practice environment has also needed to evolve.” 

A recent update to the floorplan saw the creation of several breakout, informal meeting spaces in order to accommodate and encourage different ways of working, reviewing and collaborating. 

Dan Cox remarks, “this followed a detailed process of surveying the needs of the team from a design, operational and well-being perspective, just as we would undertake with our client group; to better understand the brief from the perspective of the key people involved, the team.” 

Chris McCue comments, “whilst we will always maintain a balance of project scales; from the intimacy you experience in immersing yourself in the life of your clients in bespoke housing, to the design journey on a burgeoning hotel brand launching a new project and the extensive stakeholder engagement of a large scale commercial fitout, the practice will always retain a studio-based approach of rigorous design questioning and testing.” 

Cox concludes, “to have a studio space that is more aligned to our design process as an architecture and design business enables us to focus on further developing our team and the projects they design for every day.”