A CONVERSATION WITH SHAUN LOCKYER
Photography by Derek Swalwell
Project Featured - Whale Beach House
In Shaun Lockyer’s architecture, the personal and the philosophical are inseparable. His studio is rooted not just in place, but in perspective, shaped by the contrasts of a South African upbringing and refined within the raw, elemental landscapes of Australia. Across decades of practice, Lockyer has cultivated a design language that resists fashion in favour of feeling; one that privileges timelessness over trend, and clarity over complexity.
To speak with him is to enter a space where ideas are sharpened by lived experience: where concrete is not merely material, but memory; where the landscape is a collaborator, not backdrop; and where a home is not complete until it reflects the life lived within it. What follows is not a conventional interview, but a journey through Lockyer’s evolving worldview—equal parts rigour and intuition, craft and contemplation.
You grew up in South Africa. How did that environment shape you as an Architect, and how does it differ from the Australian landscapes you now design within?
South Africa was a very interesting place to both grow up and study architecture. A place packed with diversity, extremes, inequity, creativity, and opportunity, some good, some less so. Either way, learning and growing up there, you are, on one hand, part of a privileged group but on the other, constantly aware of the imbalance that exists. This tension is in some ways a source of enormous creative and intellectual insight, with the extremes of all things constantly tempering and moderating your thoughts, ideas, and ambition. An ironic outcome of “apartheid” was the countries enormous capacity to be self-sufficient and inventive through necessity which as an by-product washes over the methods production, finance, intellect, and certainly creativity. Pain and suffering has always been a cornerstone of creativity and in South Africa, this was always in abundance, even if you only experienced it vicariously.
Who or what are some of your key influences in architecture? Are there artists, designers, or places that have particularly impacted your work?
The colonial and European roots of white South Africa meant a strong connection to the modernist greats was inevitable and (thankfully) at the core of our education which, at the time, was transitioning from euro to afro-centric ideology. At the heart of our education was the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Lecorbusier, Scarpa, Kahn, Mies, Aalto, the Americans like Lautner, Neimeyer and de Rocha and in Mexico, Barragan. The colonial foundation to “white architecture” was heavily modernist in its leanings and we were privileged to have the likes of Mosh Safdie, Charles Correa, Pancho Guedes, Geoffrey Bawa all come through our school. The work of the great Roelof Uitenbogaardt, a student of Kahns, was not only some of the most influential work of the 80’s and 90’s, but I was lucky to have him as both our head of school at the University of Cape Town and as my design Thesis coordinator. South African exports from Under Roelofs great tutelage include Sydney’s, Neil Durbach and Saville Isaacs, Auckland’s Herbst Architects and Andre Hodgekin and Dubai’s Shaun Killa (now one of the most influential architects in the middle east). Some of the perhaps lesser known but massively influential people for me where architects like Michelle Sandilands, Paul Truscott, and Alex Roberston (all MLH in Cape Town), Norbert Rosendal and now internationally recognised SAOTA (Stefan Antoni, Greg Truen, Philip Ohlmsdahl) where I was lucky enough to work for nearly 4 years after university. On reflection, the work of architects working in concrete form the core of my inspiration with the likes of Corb, Scarpa, Lautner, Roelof being very much at the heart of this wellspring. Landscape is perhaps the biggest inspiration in our work, with constant dialogue about how to engage with, mediate and protect oneself in a sometimes-harsh climate. The work of Barragan and Bowa being a heavy inspiration (regarding landscape) in my early years and more recently the native Australian Bush being at the core of all our design work. Art; more recently is a key inspiration, but this is more Australia centric in its timing and impact on my work (as a mature practitioner).
What inspires your design philosophy? Are there particular movements, materials, or personal experiences that have shaped your creative direction?
At the core of our work is a genuine desire to want to enhance the experience of everyday living through functional, resilient, and poetic outcomes. As banal as this may sound, we try to understand who our clients are, what they need, what they aspire to and how this will impact on the outcome of the work. We try to solve all the practical things first but layer them with ideas and opportunities that explore ideas of light, shade, texture, compression, and release. These are all ideas that have existed forever but for us remain eternally relevant as while fashion may change, we believe the human condition to be universally engaged with these principals. By consequence, our work is experienced in the whole (as a singular, rational and pragmatic outcome) but more intimately as series of experiences that more intensely explore the human condition and ideas of occupation. I am constantly doing all I can through travel, media, and local interaction to nourish my creative brain to constantly seek inspiration, nuance, and opportunity in our work. Like most designers, I carry a healthy degree of scepticism, bias, inconsistency, and inner conflict about how ideas take form, how they are rationalised, to what extent ornament is required and what is “needed”. I don’t see this as a negative, I see this inner-conflict as fundamental to critical thought and while we may not make a great deal of noise about this in our work, this need to reason, for purpose and for logic, remains constant across all our projects.
Beyond the architectural inspiration, two brands (being Porsche and Rolex) are for me the ultimate in design approach, longevity, and reason. The products associated with these brands, namely the 911 and the Rolex Submariner (to name but two) have existed for around 75 years “unchanged”. The “unchanged” logic being that while they are constantly evolving, always tweaking, every time more finessed than the last, they remain “timeless” in modern culture to the extent that most people cannot distinguish the latest model from one made 10 or even 20 years ago. This approach to enduring, robust, understated elegance and value through proven results, quality, and a conscious decision to prioritise timelessness over fashion is a value that resonates with me in how we approach our work. Excellence through effort, learning, introspection and playing the long game.
The Australian landscape is unique in its diversity. How does this natural context shape your architectural perspective, and how do you integrate it into your work?
We recently produced a book of our work called “outside in” which explores the idea of how we not only respond to the landscape, but how we integrate it into the home, both regarding the spirit but also the physical. Our work in concrete affording us the construction freedom to populate the buildings with planting not only adjacent the house, but on it and even in it. By wholly integrating the landscape into and onto our homes (which are often in urban areas), we aspire to a more wholistic, connected living condition always favouring native and endemic plating over imported. We embrace the idea that all things are connected, we are all connected, so our actions, our buildings and how we engage with the landscape, all impact the world around us. And while it would be fair and accurate to critique our work for its size and often, indulgence, it would also be accurate to comment that the buildings work hard to regress, recess and diminish as the landscaping strategy matures. Our end goal is for the landscape to prevail and for the building to disappear for the experience of the homes to be about the felt sense, not the visual. This does not mean that we don’t care about how the buildings looks - far from it. It’s more about how we select materials that age sympathetically with the landscape (and ourselves) so that the experience of the spaces and outcomes leans toward the organic, not the man made. With so much of our work on the coast and in the bush, the changing moods, colours, and intensity of the landscape play heavily into our architectural response, the focus always on how we hero the house only so much as it remains a repository for the landscape. Recognising that, most people will understandably not want to give up completely to the intrusion and invasion of a landscape unconstrained, we are perennially mediating between how much landscape the building can withstand and what works for the clients. Combining “created and existent” landscape is almost always the approach taken with our projects, seeking to retain mature landscape where possible and creating strategies for new forms of landscape to complement this. As the expression goes; “ we plant the tree today for whose shade we wish to sit under tomorrow”…
Through your projects, you often put a focus on how a building will enhance people’s lives. What techniques or design strategies do you explore to achieve this?
We start with all the simple things that people do every day, many times a day. How do we make washing clothes less of a task, how do we make a bathroom a sanctuary, where do we allow kids to make a mess so that their creativity and learning is not at the expense of the house? When you make the bulk of peoples lives easier through nuanced consideration of how they function, you immediately make life (in the day-to-day sense) more enjoyable. On a more elevated level, the loftier ideals of great architecture through experience of voids, tension, materiality, serendipity, nuance, and memory are all implicit in our work but we try for these to be a reflection of our client’s personality and aspiration rather than the more egotistical approach of believing we will “change” people through the experience.
Your design allows for a “voice for the objects within it”—a concept we deeply resonate with. How do you approach designing with art, furniture, or cherished objects in mind?
Overwhelmingly we like the idea that the house is the “blank canvas” for life, art, landscape, and experience. We want the house to balance the needs to “extrovert” itself with the perhaps more meaningful desire to capture, curate and reflect the client’s personality. To this end, every window becomes about the landscape, every wall about the art. The house a vessel for furniture, ornament, and memory. From our perspective, the best outcomes are one that are seen as architecture as being “part of the whole” not the end itself. The living in of a house is what takes the architecture from being an abstraction to being a home. In the end, “architecture” is about people, even to the extent that the quality of the relationship is of greater importance to us than the building itself. Once again, this clearly does not mean that we don’t care about the architecture, we just don’t see the need to torture a client through the process or the outcome. Our approach is one of collaboration, listening and caring, all converted through hard work, diligence, and care. If the right energy is created through the shared experience, we firmly believe that this passion, effort, and goodwill become manifest in the lived experience of the house.
What is your process for designing homes that allow for a client’s stylistic expression? Is this something you discuss early on, and how does it shape your approach?
Every home reflects our clients, the budget, the place, the team, and the process. There are so many moving parts in making a home that all have a bearing on each other. To this end, we encourage our clients to express their interests, bias, hopes and aspirations but equally to try and avoid holding onto preconceived ideas that they may have. We expect the same of ourselves, that we don’t try to solve the problem before we know more about all the forces at work. Remaining open to the new, experience, change, opportunity, and differentiation are how we create work of meaning, purpose and integrity. It’s also how clients (and we) will achieve outcomes that build on what we already know but yield results that are unexpected, bespoke, and memorable. Equally, we don’t bully our clients to get “what we want” but there is a reason for everything and it’s important to both listen to their thoughts and have them listen to ours. We work as hard on every project as the next but not every client will allow themselves to embrace all that is possible, the result being that they may be inclined to revert to what they know, where they feel safe, and in so doing can risk “normalising” the outcome that is achieved. The best project outcomes reflect the best quality of client and relationship. We believe that the capacity for a superb outcome lies as much (if not more) with our clients than it does with us.
You’ve said architecture is about crafting narrative. Are there specific materials or gestures you find particularly expressive in telling a story through design?
I think its fair to say that we don’t lean heavily into abstract ideas as a conceptual point of departure (is we don’t make a building look like a surfboard because its at the beach). We like the idea that through the understanding of the potential outcome, we establish a set of rules that we keep as a “touch stone” through the project, a reason for being, a logic, a rational. Materials apply themselves in similar methods, colour is used with a specific intent, if two things are doing the same job, we would want them to look the same. There is a calm in the realised expression of logic, a sense that even if you don’t know why, you know that it feels like it was deliberate and with purpose. Like most architects (again) we also like 20% of discord, that we may “spoil the brief” and challenge our own logic to embrace a degree of serendipity, wilfulness and at times even outright folly (baroque). A building must have a sense of joy; and joy need not always have a function other than to be itself.
You’ve spoken about combining the work you see, the world around you, and the people you get to do it with. Could you tell us about a current project that reflects this convergence?
I have always been a believer in nourishing one’s mind with what is out in the world and creating a design vocabulary that reflects an understanding of the many ways in which common design problems can be solved. To effectively populate your brain with a mental picture of how you can respond to a design challenge. Never about copying anything so much as understanding the reason why the idea was interesting and understanding how that may be relevant in your application. My inspiration is plural and diverse, democratic. I look at everything around me, irrespective of its architectural relevance or success. Trying to understand how and why people respond to things and what they feel is at the core of our decision-making process. The “why” rather than the “what” is what is interesting and meaningful to us. If you want to feel a certain way, how do we translate this into the “felt sense” in the building? Topically, I am building my own house now which comes with 35 years of thought, idea, ambition, inspiration, and hope. A timeless, robust approach to design is where I started and what has guided my thinking. The concrete work of Corb, the stone from Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion, the detail of Aalto, the timber work of Wardle in his Shearers Quarters, all seminal ideas that in varying degrees have been literally and metaphorically integrated into the design. A kind of “ode to”, an homage to the greats that have shaped my thinking and changed my perspective about architecture. Experience of these places (all of which I have had) have profoundly touched me, altered my perspective, and continue to resonate and inspire, even 35 years on. Being my own house I have been able to playfully (but with intent) embrace this plural approach to design while layering our thinking over it for it to have its own set of rules, purpose and story.
What current trends or innovations in architecture and design are you most excited about? Are there any directions you’re keen to explore in future projects?
I am hoping that through necessity, the appetite for smaller, more bespoke homes becomes the trend. While big and generous is lovely for those that can afford it, the idea that a smaller, more cost-effective outcome should aspire to any less feels wrong to me. The changing world means that house typology, idea of what is needed, budget, expectation needs to change and change fast. I hope to see this aspect of architecture evolve to broaden its reach and impact on the world around us (and not just for the 1%). More pragmatically, the aspiration for natural materials, landscape and art remain trends that for me are timeless and where we base all of our thinking. Technology will do what it does, but I don’t see it changing building in Australia any time soon but welcome the point that it can sustainably and qualitatively do so.
For emerging architects inspired by your work, what advice would you give them about honing their craft and establishing a unique architectural voice?
Look, listen and learn, play the long game. Architecture is a marathon not a sprint and it takes time. Embrace the learning and growing and never assume you know everything. Chanel the child, love the people around you, treasure the landscape, learn about art, embrace the parallel design worlds, all things are connected so look for how it connects with you and how you can connect with it.
As the conversation draws to a close, what lingers is not just a catalogue of architectural principles, but a sense of deeper intent, a clarity of thought grounded in lived experience, and a reverence for the emotional life of space. For Shaun Lockyer, architecture is never just an exercise in form; it is a responsibility, a joy, and above all, a human act.
From the long grass outside Ronchamp to the shifting textures of the Australian bush, his journey has been shaped by light and shadow, memory and material, doubt and conviction. And through it all runs a quiet faith—in restraint, in beauty, in the enduring power of design to shape not only how we live, but how we feel.
In a world often chasing the new, Lockyer reminds us that meaning is found not in novelty, but in depth. That architecture, at its best, is not about making statements, but about making space.
