“I don’t believe that the ability to live in a really well designed space should be exclusive.”

Intro

Hi, it’s Bernadette here. Have you been thinking about making the move from hobby renovated to professional? Do you wonder what the difference is and how you should set yourself up? Are you curious to know how to identify the right location or the right property to renovate? Well, maybe you’ve been thinking about a joint venture. Well, the good news is that you will find the answer to all those questions and so much more in our renovation boot camp. It’s open for enrollment right now. The renovation boot camp is a 10-week online course that consists of 8 value-packed modules where you learn our entire system designed to generate an average of 100 thousand per project. You can work through the modules at your own pace, however, there are also weekly tutorials run by myself and my team of property experts to guide you in applying the learning to your specific circumstances. The numbers are capped so that we can deliver a personal experience. And if you would like to join, please go to www.theschoolofrenovating.com/bootcamp and find out more.

Let’s get into today’s episode. Ever since David started architecture, which is now more than a decade ago, we’ve had a ritual. Whenever I buy a property, we pour over the real estate floor plan and brainstorm ideas for improving its value. I have found this practice incredibly valuable. And since then, he’s graduated from University, got his Masters, part of which he did in Barcelona, worked for a high-end architectural practice in Sydney, and established his own company. He also assists our students in the boot camp, but I’ve been asking him for years, “How can we offer this brainstorming experience to them to access in their own businesses ongoingly?”.

Architectural services can be cost-prohibitive when you’re renovating for profit but he’s come up with the perfect solution. And that’s what we’re gonna be talking about today. The solution is called “The Renovator’s Concept Session” and it is available to everyone. If that piques your interest, then listen in.

Bernadette Janson: Welcome, David.

David Janson: Thank you.

Bernadette Janson: One of the things that I have found really helpful for the time that I’ve been renovating, certainly since you’ve been in the business is that brainstorming session that we have when we first look at a project. Often it happens before it’s our own. I bring, usually, we pour over the real estate floor plan and get that high-level concept plan nutted outback of the envelope type thing in order to determine what improvement we can make to the slow or to the floor plan. And to add value to the property. And so you have been doing that since you started Uni, basically. And I guess now that you have decided to offer that as a service to renovators, I guess the first thing I want to ask you is first, why? Because obviously there are bigger fish to fry. And you certainly the rest of your days spent on a larger scale, much larger scale projects. What is it that has been the motivation for creating this service?

David Janson: That’s a good question, but a big question. There are a few different levels that were inspired to be working in this area, at the really kind of a big scale meta-level. It’s about this fact that there is so much housing stock in Australia that is quite old. And at least in the next couple of decades, a substantial percentage of it will be renovated. And the way that we see the architectural profession, it’s really good at servicing really big projects, really good at servicing highly complex projects and, public works and large residential, new residential developments and even really high-end-high-budget single residential projects. But it’s quite a struggle when it comes to servicing much smaller scale projects.

There are a couple of reasons for that. That one is that they not necessarily seem to be really the kinds of projects that would end up in a portfolio, so it ends up on a website. They’re not the high ambition or the kind of aesthetically high ambition projects for a lot of architects. But probably more significantly or at least equally significant, is that the process that we go through is a very detailed one, quite a laborious one. And as a result, it’s quite expensive. It’s that the majority of the industry really struggles to service much smaller projects because of the cost of what’s involved in actually doing the work that we do. And that’s a reasonably significant problem in the context of this idea that so many people are living in properties that will be renovated at some point.

The quality of the work environment that you live in is really, really closely related to the quality of life. We think it affects your mood and it affects your wellbeing in a number of different ways. We really just don’t believe that the ability to live in a really well-designed space should be exclusive. It’s something we should be kind of more broadly accessible. At this point, one of the main inhibitors to that is it’s just that our process is quite rigid. We’ve been looking at ways that we can see how we can break that process down to what’s really essential in the kind of design process and to build it back up on the scale of a small scale renovation.

The process that’s involved in designing an award-winning freestanding building in the CBD is actually not that dissimilar to the design process. And the kind of applicability of that design process really translates when you break it down to what is totally essential in designing a building or designing your renovation. And what we’ve come to conclude in really thinking quite a bit about that and thinking about how you break that down is that it’s really all about the clear strategy. That’s a clear design strategy is what makes an award-winning product, award-winning. A clear design strategy is what makes a great renovation great. And you can spend a huge amount of money on a project with no clarity to the design strategy and build something that is perfectly terrible. Or you can spend a very small amount of money on something which has a really clear design strategy and deliver something which is a great piece of design. We just don’t think that we don’t think the budget is the key limiting factor and great design that it really comes down to the clarity of the strategy.

Bernadette Janson:  For us mortals. What does that mean?

David Janson: Well, okay, for instance. I’ve worked on my fair share of projects which you would put in the category of potential award-winning projects, the kinds of things that we aspire to put into the architectural awards. And for those types of projects, the strategy can be something related to the formal impact of the building. For instance, having a really high impact in the street could be an essential part of the design strategy. If that building needs to have an identity. One of the projects that I was lucky enough to deliver a couple of years ago and which did win a number of awards, the part of the design strategy were this idea that the building experience in the round. And so the building is, it really kind of reaches out into the street and it’s a curved building that has these warnings that extend out into the streets or out over this pavement. And it really is experienced in the round and quite in a kind of dominating finish that is kind of Steenbeck timber. And so, on a project like that, the design strategy, which is this idea of a building in the round high impact building that has a kind of iconic status in it, in its locality.

That’s how we start to talk about a design strategy of that type on a project like, say, if we’re talking about a residential renovation where potentially reworking a kitchen, a bathroom, into connecting it with other spaces within an existing apartment. That design strategy, in residential design, comes down to two-bracket areas. One is about how you move through space and the other retail space fields. It’s kind of on that really high-level stillness and movement.

To put it into terms that are probably used a lot more in the field of renovating. It’s kind of about the flow of the space and the feeling of the space. That kind of movement in the atmosphere. That kind of forms the framework of a really clear design strategy when it comes to residential renovations, particularly the spatial components of a residential renovation. And if we kind of break that down within the flow of a space, within the movement of space, you’re looking at things like how one space connects to another.

The size of the opening between the kitchen and the dining room, for instance, and the adjacency of spaces, you might look to shift a dining room, swap a dining room with another room so that it has a better adjacency with a kitchen, or shift kitchens, it got a better adjacency with a yard. That’s one aspect of it is the adjacency of spaces. Another aspect of it is how you physically move through those spaces. The placement of a door in a room is one of the key tenants that we keep coming back to in our practice. We really think that the placement of a door in a room can completely transform the way that the room is used. And it’s such a kind of small granular level of design focus that it can totally transform the feeling of a space and how you move through it. And even sometimes the direction that door swings in a room can totally transform a room. It can really scale that level of design and strategic thinking down to that level. Some of the other aspects of the movement come down to where you place furniture in a room, the proportions of the space. These things that we all kind of form how space feels to move through it. If we look at some examples of what the atmosphere is, how you generate an atmosphere in a space and how you kind of design the atmosphere of a space or what it is to be still in space.

We consider things like the proportions of the space again. The ceiling height and the length of the room that is really defined from the palace space fields, if your space has a really high ceiling height, it will have a totally different feeling to a space that has a really low ceiling height. A kind of long and narrow room with a low ceiling height has a totally different feeling to spaces that it stayed the same as the ceiling height. But it’s much shorter than the proportions of space. Things like natural light, artificial light material selections, all of these things that kind of define the way that space feels while you’re still in it.

Bernadette Janson:  Yeah. A good example of that changing the way the door swings is the Rene Street project. That’s that was one of those tiny little terraces where you step straight into the living room. And it was 60 square metres. And because the door opened against the room, you couldn’t actually see the room as you opened the door, the whole place looked small. But when we swung the other way, the minute we opened the door, we saw its full expanse of three rooms right at the back of the house. And it made a massive difference in that sense.

David Janson: Yeah. Absolutely. Sometimes it’s surprising how small of a change can have a significant impact on the outcome.

Bernadette Janson:   And as a renovator, I like going through open inspections to see some improvements. I’ll use those in inverted commas that have been done, two properties, and obviously have had no skilled design applied to them. And they just look amateur, they look dodgy, and rooms. I’m going to come really clean now and say in our really early days before you came on the scene, some of our floor plan changes and things that we did were not great. What you’re doing with this service is actually getting to the project at that very early stage and setting it in the right course.

David Janson: Yeah, definitely. Well, that’s one of the things that we think about in that context is this idea of the Pareto law, that 20 percent of your input yields 80 percent of the results. And we really think that’s especially true at the beginning of a project. That you can do a very, very, very small amount of kind of design work very early in a project centred on the right course. And in some instances, especially with your students who have got a very high level of training in how to deliver a renovation, and they may even have a reasonably good idea of how to have a design and how to deliver a design without necessarily having a kind of full and detailed set of drawings. In that context, we can actually do very, very, very small parts of projects and assist and guide in the very early stages of a project and have a massive positive impact on the design outcome.

That’s also part of why I am quite motivated about working in this way is because if I was to commit the next 10 years of my career working on products that might be perceived as having the potential of being submitted to the biggest architectural awards that there are, I might be able to feasibly within two or three of those projects in the next 10 years. But if I’m equally able to focus on much, much smaller projects, that may only require half a day or a day’s work from me. I can actually potentially do about or have a part in bringing about a 10 or 20 or even 50 percent change, positive change in hundreds of projects. If I could do a thousand products in my career, I’d be in a much happier place than if I could do ten. Having a basic metric of level interests me as well.

Bernadette Janson:  Excellent. While we’re definitely the beneficiaries of that decision, I meant to jump in earlier inside that project that you were talking about was Barangaroo house. And it’s in no way resembles any renovation that any of us can do. But it’s worth having a look at. Very interesting building. And we’ll include a link in the show notes.

David Janson: And that project was delivered with Collins and Turner Architect. Not in my name, which is an important distinction to make. But yeah, it’s very lucky of me to have been able to work on a number of projects like that. That has really made it quite clear to me that there is a real value in taking that level of design thinking that you apply to a project like that. And scaling it right down and using that gives you that strategic design process on much smaller projects.

Bernadette Janson:  Yeah, look, I’ve been doing this, for nearly 30 years. And it always amazes me because I’ll come up with what I should work on and how the floorplan should work. And then I’ll show it to you. And you just completely turn it on its head. And often the things that you come up with, the ideas that you come up with, require less work than what I was planning. And they’re just much I don’t know, it’s much simpler or something. There’s a real simplicity about your designs that give them, a lot of appeals. And certainly as a renovator, in most cases are quite easy to deliver.

David Janson: I appreciate that perspective. I also think that where I’m lucky to have been in a situation of having developed this process organically by having by working effectively with you and other renovators right there at the sketch pad reader. Because that’s actually a really important part of how we’re building this tool moving forward is that we know that if we were to take a design brief prepared and drawings and bring them back to you, that we can deliver a design. But that is going to work in a lot of ways. And that we can make a great design, not just about any space, but what a great design is to you is going to be different to what a great design is to us. And we can still work with the world to compliance aspects.

We can design spaces that are really functional but still have like three or four, three or four options within that kind of design, within the context of the existing building. And by having the renovator with us while we’re preparing that design concept, we can close the loop, quote the feedback loop rather than preparing a drawing and issuing and then having some comments and then coming back and doing this to and for four or five times. which is just frankly expensive because it’s more time that we need to spend doing more drawings and going through that feedback process. If we physically do the design in the same space or by Zoom, which is how we’re currently delivering the product, if we do that in that same kind of video conference space, we can actively develop it together and effectively bring the renovator to the drawing table with us, which is a really important part of that process.

Bernadette Janson: Prior to launching this-let’s call it a product, it’s called the Renovator Concepts session. Just for the-we’ll talk about the details in a minute. But you tested it quite extensively on quite a few of our students. And I was talking to one the other day. And you had done this plan on their family home. And what he said was that what you did in 45 minutes or an hour? Firstly, it was clear that you had spent time on it before I got there, that you had prepared well for it. And secondly, that you were able to bring clarity in 45 minutes that I had not been able to manage in nine months of struggling trying to decide what we’re gonna do with space. That’s a really powerful testament to the value of the Renovator Concepts session.

David Janson: That part is a really great example of why it’s so important to have the renovator at the drawing table with us, because I had prepared, we always prepare for these sessions. I have prepared in the sense that I’ve reviewed the plans and I had some ideas about how you might go about restructuring that space. But we almost never come to those sessions with drawing. We’ll come with the existing floor plan that we won’t actually start that session by talking through our design proposal. We will look forward to what’s the smallest intervention that you can possibly make in that space and have a huge impact. And then we’ll think about the brief effectively.

The signup process for the renovator concept is a briefing form, it has questions on how you want to redesign a space. And then that’s the kind of middle ground. And then we’ll think if we were to completely through the brief out and just look at what’s the ultimate outcome for this floor plan. And we’ll put some thought into what each of those three phases is, the minimum, the middle ground, and the ultimate. So that when it comes to having conversations with the renovator when it comes to that actual work subject workshop session, we’re kind of throwing ideas around at or especially the renovators, throwing questions to us about, “How else could we do this? What if we did that?”.

We’ve already looked outside of the scope of the kind of tunnel vision of the project, as you call it. I didn’t have a drawing when I came to that but I could have definitely had a fairly clear idea of what I thought was perfect. One brief floor plan before I walked into that workshop session. But it actually looks better for having a completely open mind to it and allowing their input to drive it.

The final outcome was, I would say, significantly better than the outcome that I would have developed in complete isolation. Part of the reason for that is that often the renovated that we’re working with have lived in the spaces. They can give us immediate feedback about, exactly what that space feels like at a certain time of day or exactly what does or doesn’t feel quite right. Which we can understand the space as much as we know, as much as we can possibly give by kind of interrogating the floor plan and some photos. But we can’t know the space the same way that the renovated can for a homeowner. We really do think that process is huge, hugely important. I don’t think that there’s been a project that we’ve done yet where it’s been just a one-way street of just us driving the design. And it’s always, always better off for it.

Bernadette Janson:  Yes. And particularly when you’re renovating for profit, you have some quite clear parameters that you need to follow. And so that’s very useful. And before we get into just talking about the detail of the service, I wanted you to tell the audience the process to become an architect. I personally, until I saw what you went through, I wasn’t really clear on the value of architecture. And well, I guess I was in a big iconic sense, but I wasn’t in terms of everyday designs and I wasn’t really sure. You think about people drawing floor plans and whatever. And I wasn’t really sure about the difference between you and me in terms of what created that difference. Now, obviously, I can see it’s we’re the pulse apart. And it’s really valuable for people to know. Some often say, “If you want to design, you’ve got to go to an architect, even if you don’t have the architect manage the projects”.  Which I personally think is where a lot of the expenses are. You want to just quickly outline what it takes to be an architect.

David Janson: Yes, a reasonably big question again. But broadly speaking, it involves five years of study, three years of undergraduate, or two years of postgraduate. Then a minimum of two years of working and practice before you can get registered as an architect.

The architect is a legislatively defined term in each state. And think you have to be registered in each state that you want to work in as an architect. But what’s specific about that process, as opposed to, say, a building designer or a draft’s person, is that the study that you do. All the way through those five years, the degree.

There are a lot of technical aspects to what we’re learning. But every single semester, a quarter, if not half of the course load is based on developing a design strategy. They called it a design studio and everyone caused countless hours into design studio because that’s really where you’re learning how to design effectively. That really only comes that’s kind of design ability, that capacity for design really only comes through. It’s a learnt skill.  I don’t think that it’s something that you’re either born with or not. I believe you develop a vocabulary for design, the more that you do it.

Those five years are actually kind of essential because it just takes that long to develop your own kind of language and process for how it is that you go about designing. And that’s probably one of the most important components. I mean, obviously, the technical aspects of it are totally critical. And the two years working in the profession before you can get registered are mostly about the technical and legal aspects of practicing as an architect. And for most people, that two years is more like five or six years or some 10 years.

 It’s quite a lengthy process. And we’re held to very, very stringent standards by the Architects Registration Board, which is the kind of mechanism for protecting the consumer from architects that might not be performing in a way that’s consistent with the code of conduct. In a sense, engaging an architect is a highly protected position to take if you’re working, especially on a very, very complex project. it’s a highly protected position to take as a consumer. But it’s also obviously a part of why it can be very expensive to engage an architect because there’s quite a bit of legislation around how we can and can’t act. And that does come at the cost of time and energy at times.

Bernadette Janson:  This is just often a slight change. But we’ll get back on the track in a minute. Why aren’t builders and developers held to the same standard?

David Janson:  Well, builders will have to go through, quite a quite a stringent process, I would say, in order to get a builder license. It’s a trade-based process rather than a design-based process and it’s a different approach to learning the technical components. But they are held to a fairly high standard. But in the same way that you have some builders out there that are not really performing at the level that they’re legislatively required to do, it’s the same as it would be the same in every profession, in every industry. There are certainly some architects out there that-I’m not sure if I can say that, but I’m not sure if I can’t say that.

Bernadette Janson:  Well, I can so there you go. OK. Let’s talk about the service and then so, it’s called the Renovator Concepts session. And when someone puts in a procession, firstly, how much do they pay for the session?

David Janson: It is 360 dollars plus GST, with that it’s around 396.  It is a part of the way that we’ve built the tool is really about absolutely minimising the amount of time that we need to spend doing admin tasks like preparing a brief and understanding the brief and all of these things that, again, they just make the process expensive for the for the consumer, which if we’re trying to figure out how we make this as cheap as we possibly can. It’s really about cutting out the fact that we don’t need to be spending time on it. It’s automated. In the signup process we’ve got an online briefing form and we’ve automated payment of it so that we don’t need to be chasing invoices. That fits into a whole ecosystem of how we can deliver the maximum value, because it’s actually not just about it being cheap, it’s about making sure that as much time as we can possibly spend on the project is spent designing rather than doing admin.

The sign-up is done through an online form. And at the completion of that form and the completion of the payment, it will prompt the person who’s signing up to the program to select a date for the workshop session. Upon selecting the date for the workshop session, they get an email confirming it. And that’s going to have the link to the Zoom session in that email. Basically, before we spend time, I can really get our heads into the project. We’ve already got the whole kind of timeline of the project or of that part of the project locked in. In both of our calendars and all the renovator has to do at that point to show up.

As a part of the workshop signup online form, it will prompt the renovator to upload a floor plan. And that could be an existing floor plan from a previous renovation, or it could be a floor plan from the sale or purchase of a property. And more often than not, they are the marketing floor plans that are used for marketing the property on the market. And we will, between the renovator, signing up for the course and meeting with them for the workshop.

As I mentioned earlier, we start to figure out what’s the minimum intervention that we would do on that floor plan. It’s the kind of optimal design outcome based on the brief that they’ve given us? And what’s the kind of maximum and ultimate scheme for that floor plan within reason. I mean, we’re not going to, we’re not gonna propose at a level to a building or a house where someone is looking to renovate the kitchen. Sometimes you’ll identify that shifting, taking out an extra wall or swapping the kitchen and the dining room will just totally transform the feeling of the space and totally transform the house. And that may be out of budget, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth having a conversation about. Because, budget is also, especially for those who are renovating a for profit budget is totally, totally dependent on the added value renovation.

Bernadette Janson:  If you’ll add more of it, then you also spend more.

David Janson: Yeah. And like, I don’t claim to be an expert in what properties, how much value you can add to a property by doing certain aspects of the renovation. But we know that the renovators are well-trained in that. They’ve got the training from the course that they’re doing with you or from or from previous experience. And so we can at least give them all the information that we know about the design and we can guide the design into a particular direction that works for them.

Bernadette Janson:  And then once you’ve got those three concepts, then you meet and put everything on the paper yet?

David Janson: Then we will kind of bring those ideas to the meeting. But as I said, we don’t actually bring drawings for the meeting because we want to develop that drawing one on one. In that, in that kind of some workshop session. And as I said before, the benefit of that is there are so many aspects to the benefit, but that’s one of the main benefits, is that we get that immediate input, that immediate feedback as we’re going. That is hugely valuable to both the design and to enter the time spent on the project. We don’t want to be developing three or four or five options if we only really need to develop one and just get the immediate feedback as they’re going that kind of like a flow in the stream of consciousness between us and the renovator in that process.

Bernadette Janson:  And then once you’ve finished the session, what happens? Do they get the designs in such? What we can draw on the screen so everyone can say yes or I should clarify that.

David Janson: Yes. Basically, in that room session, I’ll share the screen of the iPad for the meeting and I’ll just be drawing effectively, drawing live and developing that, developing the floor plan in enhanced sketch form in that meeting. And following that meeting, it’s usually a kind of semi messy floor plan that we’ve got at the end of that meeting because we’re fleshing out so many different ideas and shifting a pantry or opening a wall up there and moving things around quite a bit. By the end of that meeting, I’ll usually take that drawing away for a few hours and just tidy it up and really kind of try to clarify all of the scopes that we’ve described so that at the end of that meeting, they will get a hand-drawn PDF floor plan, which covers all of the scopes that we’ve discussed and covers those really kind of big gestures that are structuring the concept and the and the design strategy for the projects. From there. It depends a little bit on what type of product it is.

For some projects, a really small-scale kitchen, a bathroom renovation, it’s not necessarily essential to have a cad drafted floor plan. And that hand sketch might actually be enough and often is, in fact enough for the renovator to take the software from the project up and take it to a kitchen. Kitchen designer and take it to an engineer with structural engineering done. On some projects, the next kind of step up from that would really be for us to prepare a cad drafted floor plan. if it’s necessary for the project and we really just broke our services right down and put it into a modular setup like that so that we can we can build it up and make projects that need it.

Also, I really feel that if we can make spend that kind of five or 10 percent of the time on a project can have a huge impact on the rest of the project. We’re perfectly happy for the renovators to take that sketch and have somebody else deliver it. If they have the draft person that they use for all of their projects, I’d be perfectly happy for them and deliver it that way. We have the services there if they’re necessary for the project and to streamline it for the renovator. Because that’s really what we want to be able to do, is to renovate and deliver the projects, but it’s not essential for every project. Sometimes that hand-sketched session is plenty for them to run the project.

Bernadette Janson:  What is important to stress is that what you leave with is it might be one, two, or maybe three options that at their hand sketch, they’re concept, they’re not working plans. And if you do need to go to that next step, you can take it to draft’s man or builder, or you can get a fellow studio to quote on the next step of the work so that you’ve got options.

David Janson: Yeah, but importantly, you’re not having somebody. Whether it’s us or somebody else, draft up a floor plan, which you’re then going to have to modify the design for several times as you go because you’ve already worked the design out. We just think that designing while you’re drafting is a terrible format for low-cost work. Like it is, it’s sometimes totally essential to draft it and then continue developing the design as you go, but especially on small projects. It’s just a very, very expensive way to work. You can develop a design before you get there.

Bernadette Janson:  It uses different parts of the brain, designing is a creative part, drafting is the technical part, two different parts.

David Janson: And that’s exactly why it’s sometimes necessary to develop the design as you kind of move into the cad drafting arena, because sometimes, in fact, if not almost always, as you prepare a cad drafted floor plan, the technical issues start to arise. And some of those kinds of technical challenges of how we’re going to resolve this particular aspect of it starts to arise. And so you sometimes do need to develop that design as you go, but for a lot of fun, for a lot of very small projects that often happen on top of. The technical aspects are often the result of some fun. So it depends a lot on the project.

Bernadette Janson:  Awesome. We have fleshed it out. Just important to mention that for our students, when they come into the boot camp David actually comes in and does this session with the group. And basically, you can bring your floor plans in and he will do them live in that tutorial.

If you require or want to use it outside the tutorial and you’re in one of our programs, you just get in touch with that office and you will get a coupon to use, which is a very generous or fellow studio. Thank you very much. And so that’s the Renovator Concepts session. I know that it’s going to make a massive difference to our community and the community, the renovating community at large. So thanks for coming on today and all the details, plus the link to book a renovators concept session. We’ll be in the show notes. And as I mentioned, if you’re in one of our programs now, just get in touch with the admin at the school, are renovating Judy, and she will organise a code for you. And that’s it. Thanks so much.

David Janson: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Bernadette Janson: No worries. Take care.

Well, that’s it for today’s episode. Now, we’ve covered a lot and you’ll find the links to everything we’ve talked about in the show notes and also if you haven’t already done it, we would love it if you would head over to iTunes and leave us a review. We read every one of them, and it just makes such a difference to know that we are having an impact on your life and your renovation.

For those of you who’ve already left reviews. Thank you so much. And see you all next week!