In a conversation with Hamish McDonald, SHAC founder Justin Hamilton explains how precious residential work has come as a by-product of the commercial practice, and why he remains a “regional” architect.

HM: Tell us about how your connection to Newcastle came about?

JH: I arrived at the architecture degree at Newcastle University, from home in outer northwest Sydney, in 1988. At the time the architecture faculty here held the highest rating in the country, with a design course they ended up selling to the Frank Lloyd Wright School in the US. It was an immerse project-based course that produced many great architects including Peter Stutchbury. We had guest lectures by Troppo and Burgess. Lindsay & Kerry Clare, Brit Andresen and several other gold medallists have taught there.

HM: And you stayed?

JH: I met my wife Julie at university. We moved to Sydney for one year, as she had training with Westpac in the city. We were living above the train station at Chatswood, it was hectic. One day she said: There’s 500,000 people living in Newcastle, why can’t we be two of them? We packed up and drove back. I got a job in quite a large practice. The director asked me: What are you hoping to do in this practice? I said: I’d like to work here for five years, learn the ropes, and then start my own business. He said: You can’t say that in an interview! But he gave me a job on the spot, and I gave him eight years.

HM: What made you break away?

JM: There was a mature-age student with me at Newcastle Uni, Kevin Schreiber. He’d migrated from South Africa and had been a photojournalist for The Age in Melbourne. He had a very good eye -- for perspective, colour balance, depth of field and business. He called me and said he was starting a practice. Would I join him? That became Schreiber Hamilton Architecture. It was a necessary and symbiotic partnership: I was blue collar northwest Sydney; he was private school, international in his outlook.

HM: How did it work out?

JM: We caught a big break. As a student I spent my Uni holidays working in Sydney with Maitland and Butler Architects in their nuts & berries studio in Galston. Their biggest client was the Federal Airports Corporation. So, I was trained in airport design – particularly the dirty end like baggage carousels. They rang and said they had a job to expand the Newcastle Airport, but with travel considerations suggested a joint venture. It was an $800,000 extension. It grew into an $8 million job, and then into an $80 million masterplan to expand the airport from 1 million passengers a year to 5 million. We then picked up other airports: Albury, Byron Bay-Ballina, Port Macquarie, plus the 12 years of continuous work at Newcastle Airport which included work for the RAAF and British Aerospace.

HM: But you didn’t stay Australian-regional. Tell us about the ventures abroad?

JH: Kevin applied to the NSW government for an export marketing grant. It was dominated by the capital city practices so we were extremely surprised to be the only regional firm. We won a $100,000 grant that had to be spent overseas to promote Australian Architecture. We travelled to China, Oman, Qatar, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. We settled on Abu Dhabi as it was very familiar, just like Newcastle: a four-storey scale with a range of government departments and civic architecture. We ended up travelling there over six years, opening an office and working on joint ventures with a local engineering company. We exhibited 6 years in a row alongside LAB Architecture (designer of Melbourne’s Federation Square) with Zaha Hadid across the aisle! We completed 10 design projects, one a design for a $300 million defence academy. We designed it to represent the rising sun emerging out of the desert. We invested in an architecture business in Tunisia and provided this young practice with our Australian methodology. Kevin and his wife Gwenda went to live there to promote the practice and I stayed in Newcastle to promote our local practice.

HM: Then very sadly Kevin Schreiber sadly passed away not long after

JH: That was a big shift for us. We had 30 people in the terrace house in Darby St, six in the Middle East, doing airports all over Australia, medical centres, hospitals, and education. We had just started winning awards and developing our design and business identity. We reflected on our success and our valued people, we tightened the practice up, we sold the terrace house, promoted our senior people to directors and shareholders, and found this old warehouse to renovate and help reinvent ourselves. We reflected upon our place, our connection to Newcastle and the Hunter, how grateful we are for this community and our connection to Country. I related to Gregory Burgess, the Victorian architect who did the Brambuk and Uluru Kata-Djuta indigenous cultural centres. Our mantra was that we were going to return to Craft. We all go to architecture school because we are artistic, to draw, sculpt and create; to make models and to ultimately contribute and to improve our communities and the built environment, not because we are business tycoons. We added a “C” for “collaborative” to rebrand the name to become SHAC. It’s almost like a surf brand; it belongs to all of us! We only had one customer who didn’t like it at first, now they’re our biggest client.

HM: But you stayed in Newcastle?

JH: Newcastle has come of age. Back in 2010 Lonely Planet voted Newcastle in the top 10 cities in the world to visit. Cafes and restaurants have exploded. People were moving back into the city. It’s safe, affordable, accessible, and close-knit, where you know everybody. You can walk, ride, or drive to the beach and get parking free any time. We were able to reinvent industry and technology after the closing of the steelworks: then the CSIRO relocated here, and technology was on our doorstep. Maybe now there’s only 50 more years of coal. But already solar and wind tech companies are expanding. The port may get a container terminal. The airport has just embarked on a $50 million upgrade to complete that masterplan we started and become international. We can communicate and do our business anywhere in the world from right here. If a project is complex, we can partner up. A great example is the expansion of the Newcastle Art Gallery competition. We had never done an art gallery that big before, so we rang Andrew Anderson at PTW, entered a joint venture bid with his team, shortlisted into the final four, winning the people’s choice award.

HM: What gets transferred from your commercial work into other areas?

JH: Aviation architecture is about lowering anxiety – will I make it in time, get through the check-in, etc -- so we try to reassure passengers through spatial design, colour, patterns, and outlook that they can slow down, dwell comfortably and buy a coffee – airport business being 30 percent aeroplanes, 30 percent parking, and 30 percent retail! That’s relevant I guess in school, hospital, and university design. We’ve just designed a birthing suite for Hunter New England Health. We didn’t just talk to the doctors and executives; we spoke to the mums, the dads and the midwives about light, colour, views, anxiety, and stress. Now Hunter New England Health want to take that design and recreate it across regional NSW. They wrote to thank us and shared that they noticed their demand for blood transfusions had gone down because patients’ stress and anxiety was down.

HM: How does it influence your residential projects? I guess people in Newcastle have lower budgets than the big cities, but also a keen sense of community and heritage?

JH: Many clients know us from working with us on our commercial work. We tend to be asked by our existing clients to take on their personal projects which is a real honour. The house they want is deeply connected to themselves and their sense of place. People are very parochial and tend to live in certain key pockets of the city: by the beach or near the harbour, up on the mountains, in the valley by the vineyards, or down by Lake Macquarie.

HM: Tell us about some of them?

JH: We’ve just finished a house up in the Barrington Tops for a professional couple. They are very interested in the Australian bush, the Australian farmhouse aesthetic. They’d seen the Hunter Valley farmhouse we completed nearly a decade ago for my father, who is a retired shearer and wool-classer. Influenced heavily by Murcutt, so no doubt this was our little chance to “touch the earth lightly” and to respect something my father had lived through. These new clients were interested in living in the bush, but they didn’t like the critters. So, we made a little courtyard with pavilions, almost like tents around the campfire, which they could open or close as they liked, and was elevated off the ground, bushfire and flood protected. We prefabricated the house, out of cross-laminated timber in a factory in Cardiff, and then put it in a flat pack and trucked it up to this site. It was put together in three days, and it’s exquisite.

HM: That’s the bush and Hunter Valley. What about your beach dwellers?

JH: We did a beautiful home for a family at Bar Beach. The sons all walk down to the beach barefooted with their boards under their arm, then come back and dip in the plunge pool, have a shower, then open the house right up to grab the nor’easter breeze that kicks in a 2 o’clock every day in Newcastle. Then when it gets too windy, they want to shut down that front, and go and sit in a sunny courtyard out the back in winter. Every time you design a home for someone you must respond the entire family, what’s unique to them, their pets, their collection of art and their extended family gatherings. And of course, you get to understand and respectfully design for the place and the landscape.

HM: And the people down on the lake?

JH: We’ve just completed a house at Wangi on the shore of Lake Macquarie, on a terraced block of land close to where William Dobell lived and painted. These people are avid sailors, so they know about rigging, fine detail, tension, and compression. They’re interested in views of the lake, and the dappled light through the gum trees on the foreshore. And something attracts us to pavilion architecture, taking the pieces apart a little bit and letting light and ventilation and orientation in, and let the landscape bleed between the pavilions so that it’s immersed in the space and there is a view from every space.

HM: How about your more urban, inner-city housing?

JH: Last year we finished a place on the top of The Hill in Newcastle. The site had an original, worker’s cottage and a large block of land beside it. The family decided they’d subdivide it, keep the cottage and maybe AirBnB it, and build themselves a new home. It’s a very quiet part of Newcastle even though it’s right in the centre, with long vistas over Fort Scratchley all the way up to Port Stephens, or out to the whales off the coast, and a glimpse of the obelisk up on the very top of The Hill. So, we understood the sea breezes and views, and made the house a pavilion to have your keepsakes in, but one that opens and shuts. You can open that front door and just wander down into the city and enjoy the cafes, the beach, the art gallery, and the library. And when you go back home, it’s warm and cosy, lots of caramels and browns and local timbers, a little crow’s nest on the top Shepherds Hill.

HM: And you’ve done some medium-density housing too?

JH: We also focus on small town houses and affordable housing such as around the back streets of Cooks Hill, a lovely suburb like the “Glebe” of Newcastle, tiny terrace houses. We put four townhouses into one of the backstreets a couple of years ago. We didn’t know who the end-users were going to be, but we still wanted them to have the right scale and form. We are not interested in heavy bold statement juxtaposing something very radical next to something traditional. We will look at the context, and understand height, scale, repetition, form, character, and takes clues for our design. We don’t want to copy the heritage work. We want it to be the architecture of its day. But we want it to be quite respectful of what’s been here before and leave a delightful legacy for future generations.

Image: Justin Hamilton / Supplied

Branko Miletic

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