24 Hours with Studio Edwards

“On the surface, it seems simple – they covered for each other's deficits and created outlets for each other's strengths. Paul's melodic sunshine smoothed out John's bluesy growls, while John's soulful depth gave ballast to Paul and kept him from floating away.” – Joshua Wolf Shenk 

“Which Beatle are you?” Nancy asks. Ben looks to the sky to ponder but before he can answer Nancy snaps back with narrowed eyes, “don’t you dare say Paul.” The Beatles are top of mind as Ben was telling tales over lunch about his days spent in Liverpool as a young architect. He lived on Penny Lane – made famous by the Beatles’ 1967 hit song of the same name. We’re waiting at the pedestrian crossing at a set of traffic lights and Ben has been humming Penny Lane. I start to wonder: If Ben’s not Paul, who is he? Is he John? Does that make Nancy, Paul?

I’ve spent the better part of a day with Ben and Nancy. Successful creative partnerships are endlessly fascinating and theirs is no different. I’m not about to run some line about how these two have got some Lennon-McCartney-level magic going on, but this idea of “...cover[ing] for each other's deficits and creat[ing] outlets for each other's strengths” (as Joshua Wolf Shenk wrote of McCartney and Lennon’s creative partnership) is not unlike the Studio Edwards dynamic. Ben is conceptual and Nancy brings the concepts back to earth with practical considerations about things like storage (“I fucking love drawers” she tells me). Ben pauses when a question is posed and looks skyward, whereas Nancy is lightning quick and direct. 

It’s just the pair of them at Studio Edwards. We meet late morning at their studio – a squat little shopfront sandwiched between Tortas & Tacos and a Bikram yoga studio on Johnston Street, in Fitzroy, Melbourne. When I arrive, Ben and Nancy are eager to know how things are going with our new magazine. We wander onto discussing the challenges of distribution and, before I know it, they’re live designing a hole-in-the-wall ATM-like contraption for our magazine. We’d put it in their window, they say, as their shopfront gets better foot traffic than our studio. “How would we build it?” Nancy asks Ben and… I’ve lost them. They’re locked in deep prototyping mode. This is a pair of creatives incapable of resisting the temptation of a challenge or problem unsolved. They’re animated by the possibilities and uncharted territory of it all.

I’ve known Ben and Nancy for more than five years. We shared our former studio space in nearby Collingwood, which they redesigned into a playful and flexible coworking space. The principles employed as part of this design – a considered approach towards the lifecycle of the materials employed – has come to characterise Studio Edwards’ practice. This is no hyperbole, either. Earlier this year, we relocated our studio (just down the road) and two of the four yellow powder-coated steel structures that were our former office ‘pods’ travelled with us to become the base of a new outdoor entertainment space. The other two were happily passed onto our friends at sustainable developers, Made by Bare and HIP V. HYPE, to be repurposed into urban infill and meanwhile use projects. As for the Oriented Strand Board (OSB) panels that walled the steel structures in their original forms, these are currently being repurposed as shelving and benchtops for the kitchen refit and retail store fit-out in our new studio space.

“That was at the forefront of our design thinking: what can we do using the least amount of stuff and how can we design something that can then be taken apart if it needs to – something that can change and evolve,” Ben explained in an interview with Never Too Small back in 2021. Simple things – such as not altering the dimensions of the OSB panels from how they arrive from the timberyard – are what present greater opportunities for repurposing those materials into the future. Studio Edwards was fine-tuning these ideas elsewhere in Collingwood around the same time period, but for a compact retail space – Finesse, a rare and limited edition sneaker boutique. Steel vertical acrow props (or scaffold, to you and me) support display shelves, each fabricated from a singular folded aluminium sheet. Nothing is bolted or fixed to a wall or the ceiling, making the space flexible, adjustable and resulting in a setup that can easily be removed and relocated at the end of the tenancy. The outcome is not only hugely practical, material efficient, environmentally friendly and economical, it’s also strikingly original. The construction-chic scaffold mixed with the soft lustre of the aluminium and warm blush tones of the painted walls. It's terribly elegant while also landing as very… street (or “a sense of ‘urbanness’ relevant to the nature of selling sneakers” according to the judges’ citation for the 2022 Australian Interior Design Awards). The same panel of judges praised Studio Edwards and a design that demonstrates a “restrained and minimalist approach to materiality yet doesn’t lack personality…”.

This deft balance is evident throughout Studio Edwards’s portfolio of work across residential, retail and workplace design. And it is this counterintuitive logic – a spareness of materials artfully delivering a surplus of character – that sparked this creative partnership. Long before Nancy met Ben she tells me, a friend serendipitously gave her a book about architects and their houses. There were a lot of nice homes in it, but nothing that captured her imagination, but as she was flicking through the pages there was a picture of Ben in his home ‘Doll’s House’ (as it was then), with its peeled-away plasterboard revealing underlayers of exposed brick alongside unfinished plywood joinery and unvarnished floorboards. “It stood out from all the other designs in there. I think there was a skull in there somewhere…?” Nancy says. “I thought: this is really cool. And from there, Studio Edwards was on my radar.” Nancy is originally from Adelaide but moved to Melbourne – gradually – over the course of her internship with Ben and Studio Edwards in 2018. Nancy is a mere 30 years of age and has this year been named as one of the Australian Design Review’s “30UNDER30 Architects and Innovators of the Built World for 2023/2024” alongside being named a winner in The One Club for Creativity’s prestigious Young Guns 22 competition, celebrating global creative professionals aged 30 or younger.

While Ben’s been in the game longer and his name is on the door, there’s no hierarchy at play. Nancy is a co-director and banter passes naturally between them. When Ben is recounting his early career as an architect in the UK bouncing between his native Dorset, Liverpool and London, he mentions a studio he set up with a friend in London and Nancy snidely chimes in from her computer across the room: “What was it called?”. “The Intervention,” Ben says through a smirk, wearing the tease good-naturedly. “It sounds like a medical procedure but I thought it was pretty cool at the time”.

This sense of wanting to shake things up crept in early for Ben in his career in the UK. “I thought I was going to change the world, and everything that was wrong in architecture. It was so boring and fusty. Me and some friends were sort of like these rockstar architects,” he says. But the rockstars “basically ran out of money” and one of them got a gig elsewhere. The silver lining, however, was that Ben returned home to his mum’s in Dorset and subsequently took up an opportunity at Cheshire Robbins in the local town of Christchurch. The late Gordon Robbins was at the helm as a sole practitioner. “He had this a white combover thing and only wore brown. Everything in the office was brown. He was like something out of the 1950s. Mid Century Modern on crack. He had a brown Porsche convertible and so we’d go to site and it was like something out of Danger Mouse or Batman: we’d go down the spiral stairs, get in the car, the garage would open, and then we’d shoot off. He always had the top down and it was fucking freezing but it was so YEEHA!”

The mentorship was instrumental for Ben in building knowledge and learning how to run a practice, and perhaps also instructive from the standpoint of landing on a trademark colour. Ben’s favourite is not quite as ubiquitous as his former mentor’s brown, but yellow still makes regular appearances in his wardrobe, their workplace and their designs. In a sense, this is what lured Ben into architecture in the first place, the idea that architecture could present a canvas for self expression: “I realised it wasn’t what I thought it was. Architecture could be a canvas for ideas, philosophy and art. Something you could bring your own personality to.”

***

Seven years ago, Microluxe, Ben’s 22-square-metre apartment design, was the subject of the first ever episode of Never Too Small on YouTube. We have featured more than 200 small apartments on our channel since then and still Microluxe remains so singular, so distinct. So genre bending. The audacious clash of opulence and utilitarian rawness is what stands out. There’s the dramatic patchworked marble, the gold mirrored surfaces and the full-size bathtub, more or less in the living room. But then there’s all the exposed piping and sliding door tracks, matte metal and concrete, and not to mention the gaping hole in the plasterboard. “Buildings are made of steel and bricks and structural things. Sometimes it’s about taking things off to reveal. A nice idea of discovery,” Ben explained back in 2017.

All of these designs: Microluxe, Doll’s House, Finesse and NTS Space, have been crucial building blocks towards Studio Edward’s latest project, which Nancy believes is the truest distillation and expression of their studio’s philosophy and approach. The goal for the design of this 900-square-metre workplace for digital agency Today Design in Collingwood, Melbourne, was to leave zero waste in its wake. To this end, the integrity of its readily available materials was maintained wherever possible with no applied finishes – no plasterboard, no laminate, and no MDF. Additionally, all interior walls are based on a standard material sheet size of 2.4m in height, which means no cutting and no wastage. OSB board appears again, as do the scaffold structures but they’re softened by the presence of translucent recycled sailcloth privacy screens and elsewhere, recycled denim acoustic panels, cleverly fixed in place by magnets (again, to promote reuse and remove the need for fixings). But perhaps the most surprising material in play here is the translucent corrugated sheeting that wraps around the meeting spaces. It looks very like the stuff my maternal grandfather used for his backyard greenhouse-cum-potting shed he self-built in the 1960s. In this context, however, it is startlingly modern and extremely successful. It exchanges light between spaces while offering visual and acoustic privacy. It’s such an unfussy material and yet punches well above its weight with the sense of texture and visual interest it delivers, all of it elevated by a timber frame lightly washed in turquoise. 

Unsurprisingly, this design has attracted a significant amount of attention and secured Studio Edwards multiple awards. And rightly so, it’s prompting vital conversations about a new standard for workplace design that puts the lifecycle of employed materials front and centre in an effort to arrest grossly wasteful norms. Another urgent issue the pair is taking on is the need for innovative models for increasing urban density. They are awaiting planning approval to develop the site of their studio to make it mixed use, with a multilevel residential apartment above. The idea is all about defending the fabric of the city. We can do this, and preserve our high streets, Nancy argues, by creating more housing above the shops and businesses on those high streets so there are more people within the city to engage with them.

Their design “sets a precedent for this type of construction,” Nancy tells me. “Shop fronts in Melbourne: there are so many of them and they’re probably under heritage overlay. We’re not talking about demolishing a shop, we’re just talking about a light intervention.” The intervention is made light by a concept that sees a three-level prefab steel box constructed off site and then brought to site to be craned in. The project will also dictate a shift for Studio Edwards from architect to architect/developer – not an uncommon combination of hats to be worn by other architect practices currently leading the way in ethical multi-residential development in Melbourne – but still, a first for this studio. The intent is to realise a proof of concept that other architects and/or developers might embrace and iterate on. It strikes me that this willingness to set their ideas free into the world is not necessarily the norm in their line of work. Something that can be traced back to their shared love of the problem, the puzzle, the challenge? An eagerness to see how ideas might evolve?

“We don’t always have the capacity to take one thing to the total end, so it’s about putting our energy into coming up with the idea and then ideally bringing in other people to help us. Because we’re small,” Ben says. “So we feel like we can do big things but we have to do them in such a way that we can get things moving or it’s an idea that people can take. Because nobody owns an idea. The more ideas you put out there, the more ideas you have. I think I’ve found that people who covet ideas typically don’t have many. You give them away and I think that’s fine. I think it’s exciting.” A value of creative collaboration underpins one of Studio Edwards’ longest running projects, alt.material: a community-minded initiative providing a platform for both emerging and established design talent to experiment with materials and space in provocative ways. Much like Ben and Nancy’s on-the-fly concept for a disruptive method of distribution for our magazine, alt.material has recently expanded to offer independent designers selling furniture and other design objects an alternate and more commercially viable route to market.

***

I ask Ben and Nancy what sets them apart, what do their clients come to them for? “It’s not for something you’ve seen on a Pinterest board or everything that’s in Vogue. Every project looks different. There might be a thread of a material, but it’s ultimately about unlocking a problem or challenge. You’re not just designing a space, you’re also designing a way of living, a way of working or a new way of marketing a product,” Ben says. “I think that’s a space we’re more interested in.” If there’s a common trait to their clients, Ben says, it’s that they want to be challenged. “They’re innovators, fresh thinkers, they’re entrepreneurial. Even if that’s in the way they live.” Angles are likely another prerequisite I conclude. You’d have to like a sharp angle to be attracted to the work of Studio Edwards. Sometimes decorative, sometimes an artful intervention to invite light into otherwise uninviting spaces, but always dramatic. “We’ve reflected on our work and acknowledge it’s quite adventurous and might not be everyone’s cup of tea,” Ben says. Even still, they only ever present a single concept to a client. “And we’ve never presented a concept and the client’s gone ‘nup’. We’ve had high fives, we’ve had cheers, we’ve had tears,” (happy overcome tears, to be clear) “but never a ‘nup’.”

***

There’s a stereotype in Melbourne when it comes to architects. That they all wear black and that they’re sometimes a little too serious. Like most stereotypes, it’s a gross generalisation but there’s also a kernel of truth in there somewhere. It’s no surprise for me to learn that one of Ben and Nancy’s favourite architects is Renzo Piano, one of the founding fathers of the high-tech architecture movement and one of the architects behind the iconic Pompidou Centre in Paris. With its services and structure on its outside, Piano once described the building as a spaceship "that landed unexpectedly in the heart of Paris". If you’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing it from above – perhaps from a plane, or in a photograph – the spaceship metaphor will ring true. It's a joyful riot of colour against the grey-cream-brown homogeneity surrounding it. The image of it prompts me to think back to the workspace that Ben and Nancy designed for Never Too Small. The four yellow steel pods with their OSB panelled walls. The panels in three of the four pods were painted white and one was left unfinished. “I think that was partly a reflection of us, as well as the whole idea of going to a dinner party and all the chairs matching – it almost gives me a panic attack,” Ben shudders. “It’s about breaking up that idea that everything has to be the same.”

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