The Australian beach house is embedded in Thomas Caddaye Architects' psyche – capturing the essence of how people choose to live as much as engage with the Australian landscape. The NSW coast is where Caddaye and his team spend most of their time, working on projects from north of Sydney to the far South Coast. And although based on the coast and in Canberra, it’s the coastal clients that regularly beckon.
Initially trained in industrial design and graduating from the University of Canberra in 2000, Caddaye’s career trajectory led him to work as an intern at Alfa Romeo in Italy before returning to Australia. Although industrial design promised a more bespoke career, he was later working on designs for products that were produced in the thousands and tens of thousands so it was inevitable that, being an architect’s son the idea of pursuing a career as an architect - designing bespoke homes for individual clients - took hold, and he subsequently graduated in 2011 with a Masters in architecture from RMIT University.
In keeping with his desire to work on individual homes, Caddaye worked for several years for Melbourne-based office Michael Morris Architects (formerly of Morris & Pirrotta). And a few years later he took on a position with Collins Caddaye Architects (his father being a founding director), a significantly larger practice covering everything from multi-residential, educational and health work. But while this provided a boarder architectural perspective, at the core of Thomas Caddaye’s modus operandi was to work on smaller projects, with individual clients, rather than liaising with large organisations.
His current practice emerged around 2014 when he renovated and extended his family’s home at Broulee on the New South Wales South Coast. The same builder was after a design for a dual occupancy nearby, and that was followed by a request to design a new house on a vacant block at Rosedale. For Caddaye, it’s the opportunity of working directly with clients from the initial briefing phase to design and development – not dissimilar to the ethos of industrial design that delivers a more artisan outcome that one that’s mass produced.
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Registered architect Thomas Caddaye takes a thoughtful and sensitive approach to every new project, irrespective of scale or budget. And while some larger practices might hand over a schematic to more junior staff to fill in the detail, Caddaye is in a position to oversee every stage of the design – if anything, giving more time if that’s required. Budgets can be modest and works sometimes small scale, but these are handled with as much efficiency and care.
For Caddaye, it’s about delivering architecture that responds to the local context as much as the ‘architectural tectonics’ - carefully putting things together and taking the time in the detailing and selection of materials. Rather than just following international design trends, the work emanating from the studio is more akin to regional modernism, capturing the essence of the local context, the unique culture and as importantly, the way his clients want to live, both in the present and well into the future.
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Text by Stephen Crafti
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