Kylee Schoonens is the principal of the national architecture and interior design firm Rothelowman and was recently named one of the state’s most influential people by WA Business News in its 2024 edition of Power 500. She speaks to Realest about the power of good design, the value of apartment living, and her vision for Perth's escalating popularity.
Kylee, how did your affiliation with Rothelowman come about?
I ran my WA architecture and interiors practice, Fratelle, for 13 years before merging it with Rothelowman at the beginning of 2023. I’ve always had a passion for making Perth a great city and positively impacting how people live here, especially when it comes to architecture and apartment living. About five years ago, I wanted to expand the work Fratelle was creating in WA, so we looked to collaborate with a national firm creating incredibly innovative residential projects across the east coast of Australia and with whom I felt Fratelle’s design ethos and way of working were culturally aligned. This collaboration led to our merger of our belief that, as Rothelowman, we could bring a difference in approach to delivering architecture and interiors in WA.
Since our merger, I have led the Rothelowman team here in WA, and we are dedicated to creating amazing spaces people want to live, work, play and stay in. We are a national firm with five offices across the country, but we operate as one studio – a collective think-tank that allows us to cross-pollinate ideas on design and construction to craft spaces people love living in. Our projects, like our studios, are spread across Australia, but we know the nuances and what makes a design bespoke to its location and we adapt these ideas to WA. As local designers, we understand what WA wants – a relaxed outdoor lifestyle. We have beautiful weather all year round, so we design in a way that allows people to embrace our amazing landscapes, vistas and climate, recognising that Perth is evolving and needs its own nuanced identity, but we incorporate design thinking from the more evolved apartment markets in other cities we work in, including Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and the Gold Coast.
Why is your emphasis on designing large-scale developments?
Creating communities and responding to great architecture are critical to the evolution of our cities. We collaborate to deliver mixed-use projects such as apartments, hotels, retail, workplaces and student accommodation – spaces where people choose to spend a significant portion of their daily lives. We treat our apartments as neighbourhoods with plenty of communication points. A prime example of this is our apartment project for Realmark, nestled into the high street of an inner Perth suburb – creating a desirable new home for its many residents with a focus on amenities and experience. In WA, the traditional 4 x 2 freestanding home on a large block close to where we grew up may no longer be an affordable option – so more affordable options are needed to ensure we can provide housing opportunities and viable, thriving neighbourhoods across the city for a wider demographic. We work with our clients to strategise the most appropriate development outcomes for sites, carefully considering housing prices and land values, aiming to create communities where people can live where they choose, in places they are familiar with. We consider how people interact and create opportunities for residents to connect with their neighbours.
The traditional ideas of work-life balance have radically blurred the line between our ‘at work selves’ and our ‘out of work selves’. No longer limited to the confines of the nine-to-five hours or a Monday-Friday work week, our days have become an amalgam of all facets of our lives: work and play inclusive. This blur means that we create places of the scale that allow people to experience work, life, play and stay all in the same place.
How can architecture be used as a powerful tool in this current climate?
Rothelowman’s ability as architects to synthesise creative design capacity, commercial intelligence and an acute sensibility towards the built environment distinguishes our practice and impacts how people live, every day. We craft beautiful spaces occupants feel proud to live in. Our work continues beyond the site's boundaries; we consider our buildings, how they sit on the site, and their impact within the wider context. We design from the inside out before considering how they look from the outside, because if you have a beautiful plan, you have a beautiful building.
Considering today's environmental challenges, how do you see architects' role in shaping sustainable communities?
We don't consider sustainability an add-on element; it's intrinsic in every part of the built-form, and we consider it from the outset. Sustainability guides how we design spaces. It informs an efficient layout, the amount of natural light each space receives, connection to the country, and the building's operational cost. Crafting sustainable and pleasant spaces for people to live in means they are never too hot or cold, reliant on mechanical forces, and breathe naturally.
You are an advocate for the property and construction industry. Where does the market sit, and where will it progress over the next five to ten years? Prior to 2022/23, the WA housing market had been stagnant for a long time, creating what is now a massive unmet need for housing. There simply has not been enough housing built in the past ten years to accommodate current and future population growth, but that provides massive opportunity for new projects to be developed in WA. We need more homes completed to meet the current demand. With housing scarce in the next five to ten years, property values will significantly rise. We haven't had enough homes built because it was hard to get the projects to stack up financially, but now, with increasing land and product value, projects are viable again. Since the pandemic, there has been a 40 to 50 percent increase in construction prices and a massive surge in property values due to the low levels of housing available, therefore development projects are now becoming feasible again. Many new residential projects are commencing, which will help fill the housing supply gap.
Is apartment living the solution for WA's burgeoning population?
The availability of land for housing across WA, and our relatively small population on a global scale, mean that for many years the attitude towards apartment living in Perth was seen as a stepping stone to living in a freestanding home. This is not the case anymore. WA had an unsophisticated approach ten years ago, which has since evolved, and like any other growing international city our attitude towards apartment living is maturing and is no longer seen as a second housing choice; it's a desirable long-term lifestyle.
As the value of WA homes continues to increase, they become unattainable, especially for the younger generation. WA has been behind the rest of the country regarding apartment living. The apartment market now is very different; what we see being delivered – amenities, opportunity, and lifestyle – drives incredible built-form outcomes. In the past 12 months, 90,000 people have moved to WA so the demand for delivering new housing is ever-increasing – and we need to take cues from other Australian cities on how they have successfully grown. For example, Rothelowman has designed many apartment projects across Queensland, which has a lifestyle and climate similar to WA's. Across Brisbane we are currently curating projects that are effectively vertical villages – including green spaces, interiors that blur with the outside landscape and front yards, to apartments where residents can sit and chat with their neighbours over a cup of tea. The amount of amenity is fantastic. We take a humanist approach to our designs and consider how people will live in and outside these spaces. Our point of difference to the architectural design of these projects is next level.
What global design trends do you see that adapt seamlessly with WA design and lifestyle? The value people place on flexibility and lifestyle is increasing in line with the ever-increasing cost of living. Financially, people look at daily expenses, including how much their home costs to live in all year round, which drives us to design spaces that people can use efficiently. We love designing mixed-use projects, where we prioritise creating shared spaces outside the home that make cost-effective connections, such as a ground floor café, working spaces or theatres where neighbours can come together to meet. This sense of community is a key aspect of our design philosophy, where residents can also personalise and make their own. When living in an apartment community, residents crave the ability to personalise their spaces. It doesn't have to be moving walls or furniture. It's about giving people flexibility in choosing the apartment they want to live in or providing a bespoke furniture package they can incorporate into their homes.
How do your commercial projects contribute to your vision for Perth?
The evolution of mixed-use developments requires us to think about places differently, especially in Perth. We need to think about how what we create contributes to the life of a place – how the physical mirrors the social. This is about a holistic view of how a mix of uses can ‘orchestrate’ a full and seamless snapshot of life, a ‘yes’ to creating spaces where we can ‘smell the roses’, kick a ball, exercise and play with the kids. At Rothelowman, we craft our hospitality spaces like we craft our apartment projects – the two walk hand in hand.
Crafting a meeting place and understanding how to make spaces so people can comfortably utilise them with their friends is critical. Adapting a heritage building to create an iconic new backdrop for people to make memories or recall past time spent there is critical. By understanding how to stitch together nuanced spaces, whether in residential or hotel spaces like the Claremont or Guildford hotels, we are playing our part in adding to the stories within those walls of the people who have come before us. Architects and interior designers provide the canvas to create the storytellers for today. We celebrate the buildings' heritage and modernise them. It's important to make these spaces feel comfy all day with good cross-ventilation and plenty of natural light so people can stay and play within them. It is the approach we use with all of our projects. For example, old heritage buildings are often dark, with small windows, making them hot in summer and cold in winter. With the work we do to recraft them, we open them up and create points of grandeur, focus, comfort, and a sense of wow.
From your experiences, what challenges and opportunities can emerge when working on existing buildings compared to constructing a new one from scratch?
When you start creating a project with a blank piece of paper, you must understand the client brief and their commercial drivers for a project. As architects, we are problem-solvers. We adapt a brief or an idea into a space they want to be in. With every new building, our focus is on rational design, humble innovation and the commerciality of how we create a rational yet beautiful plan and craft spaces around that. For example, a renovation explores the opportunities that might be hidden and also crafts a rational response. How do we craft the building to make it a more open-plan space and functional? More complex, more unknowns. It's about the art of creating and understanding the construction of a renovation or inserting a new building into the space. Similar commercial drivers, very different built-form outcomes.
How can we nurture the relationship between architecture and people?
Well-designed architecture is generous, humble and beautiful. It shouldn't be austere or obvious, just a nice place people love to spend time in. Many well-designed spaces look simple, but under the covers they are quite complex to make it look that way. Complex nuances go into well-designed spaces. Architecture needs to be efficient and honest, and we mustn't double up on costs to keep it as lean as possible, particularly in the current market. This is important across all of Rothelowman’s work. Because we work across multiple markets in the living space and don't have a singular design style, there's a lot of cross-pollination of ideas and working knowledge shared nationally. Our cross-sector design strategies inform our work, allowing Rothelowman to deliver market-breaking design to many different projects, crafting spaces people want to live in, but we make it bespoke for each location across Australia.
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