Meet The Architect Behind Some Of Brisbane’s Coolest Spaces

As the founder of Brisbane and Gold Coast-based architecture and interiors studio J.AR OFFICE, Jared Webb is driven by a single idea: that Brisbane deserves spaces as good as anywhere else in the world.

It feels like a rite of passage for people from Brisbane to want to leave Brisbane. It’s often the people who stay, however, who end up shaping the city the most.

Take Jason Daniel, proudly building LSKD from the ground up in Logan, streets away from where he went to school. Or Adam Flaskas, who founded the city’s favourite riverside hangout, Howard Smith Wharves; the Malouf family, behind the James Street precinct and The Calile Hotel; and Giorgina Venzin, the force behind beloved institutions like Pawpaw Café and Darvella Patisserie. The same can be said for Jared Webb.

Jared Webb at the Brisbane J.AR OFFICE HQ. Photographed by Jessie Prince

“I never thought I would actually still be living in Brisbane,” laughs Jared. “But I’m still here and it’s because of my occupation as an architect, where the essence of everything we work on is contributing to our hometown and making it a more liveable and exciting city.”

There’s a sense that’s been building for years: Brisbane is finally coming of age, shedding its “big country town” reputation and stepping up alongside the likes of Sydney and Melbourne. A rapidly improving dining scene has undoubtedly led the charge, alongside major cultural additions like the recent state-of-the-art Glasshouse Theatre. With the Olympics on the horizon, the pressure of hosting is on – and it’s people like Jared Webb who are ensuring Brisbane rises to the occasion.

For Jared, there was never really another path but architecture. He remembers the awe of seeing the Sydney Opera House for the first time (“It commands such a presence”), visiting display homes as a kid, and travelling in his late teens with eyes newly opened to the longevity of built cities far older than our own – Rome and its landmarks like the Pantheon being a case in point.

“The essence of everything we work on is contributing to our hometown and making it a more liveable and exciting city.”

While studying, he began working at Richards & Spence, contributing to the masterplan that would reinvigorate James Street, including Australia’s first urban resort, The Calile Hotel. After more than a decade at the firm, which has become known for its “gentle brutalist” aesthetic, Jared developed a clear philosophy around design: architecture should have purpose, be enduring, and respond meaningfully to the context in which it’s placed.

J.AR OFFICE emerged from those learnings, alongside a critical view of Brisbane’s built environment and a growing frustration with the state of the city’s property development. The studio’s three design pillars respond directly to that tension and are as follows:

1. The creation of shade. “Being such a hot city, I don’t understand why so many of our footpaths aren’t shaded. Where are the trees?”
2. The creation of character-filled buildings. “Everyone is obsessed with the new, and with the new comes no soul. How do we make buildings that endure and are worth keeping?”
3. The creation of more inviting public spaces. “Something like King George Square is actually a poor example of a town square. You’ll fry like an egg out there.”

Referring to themselves as “third space designers,” J.AR OFFICE have a knack for creating spaces that people actually want to spend time in. Not your office, not your home, but a liminal space somewhere in between that you actively seek out, be it a bar or a hair salon.

The stainless-steel interiors of The Disco salon in Stones Corner. Photographed by David Chatfield

They say passion is contagious, and speaking with Jared about his practice, that rings true.

Less than four years in, and already recognised with multiple design awards, the studio has delivered some of South East Queensland’s most interesting new spaces, from the stainless steel interiors of Stones Corner’s The Disco to the textural theatrics of Mermaid Beach’s Norté. At the core of it all is an experience-first approach, underpinned by a desire to shift Brisbane’s underdog status.

“We want to create projects that meet the calibre of people who live here and for the city to operate on a more worldly level,” he says. “Each project, we’ll go into it thinking, ‘let’s create something that doesn’t exist here.'”

Central, the subterranean Cantonese restaurant inspired by old-school Hong Kong, is a prime example. “It’s a basement tenancy with no natural light, so we wanted it to feel immersive by drawing upon the heritage of the cuisine,” Jared explains. “The proportions of the room are based on the view lines from a Cantonese opera stage, except here, the stage is actually the kitchen.” A more unlikely reference point comes from the TV show Severance – specifically its elevator scenes, where characters descend into their office and mentally dissociate from the outside world. “We drew parallels with the show because of the disconnect between what is happening above in the city and what is happening below in the basement.”

Formerly an Art Deco apartment building, the space has been transformed intoan Australian bistro, Marlowe, on Fish Lane, photographed by Jessie Prince.

On the other end of the spectrum is Marlowe, housed in a former 1930s Art Deco apartment block in the city. Turning 14 apartments into a functioning restaurant was, at its core, an exercise in preservation, giving a heritage building a new lease on life without erasing what made it worth keeping in the first place. Jared likens it to “a grand old dame, giving her a fresh face and coat of lippy.” The result is a very homely, very comforting dining experience made even more memorable by the icebreaker delivered upon being seated. Your waiter tells you which room of the former apartment you’re in: the old living room, the bedroom, or even the toilet. It’s a small but delightful detail that speaks directly to the experiential design Jared has built his practice around.

“There’s a big culture in Brisbane of erasing and starting new and I think that is a detriment to the quality of our built environment.”

Across the river in the CBD, Golden Avenue showcases how clever design can work with Brisbane’s greatest challenge – the heat – rather than against it. Think of the restaurant as a kind of Hanging Gardens of Brisbane: a lush, striking, and entirely unassuming oasis in the heart of the city serving up Middle Eastern fare, where J.AR OFFICE designed everything from the architecture down to the plates on the table. Rather than relying on air conditioning, the venue is naturally ventilated using shade, thermal mass, and cross-breezes, along with fans designed by J.AR OFFICE, to create a climate-controlled building. Skylights, shutters, and retractable roofs allow the venue to react and adapt to the outside conditions accordingly, so the building feels just as alive as the people dining inside it. From the street, its brutalist exterior is at odds with the heritage and high-rise buildings that encompass it – an unexpected yet welcome spot to stumble upon in the middle of the CBD.

Golden Avenue: a lush, Middle Eastern restaurant on Edward Street, photographed by David Chatfield.

That instinct – to create something unexpected – extends to projects yet to be realised. At the top of Jared’s list? A public toilet block. “I love the idea of having a beautiful form, but inside is just about function,” he says. “How can we create something beautiful that is mundane in operation? That kind of thing excites us.”

In a city with a habit of ridding its past to make room for the new, Jared is approaching things differently. “There’s a big culture in Brisbane of erasing and starting new and I think that is a detriment to the quality of our built environment,” Jared says. “There are so many uninspiring projects that have started to dominate our city, so it’s something at our office that we are doing – looking at small implementations that start to redirect how our city can be perceived and experienced.” It’s a sentiment that cements Jared as one of the most compelling young architects working in Australia right now: one who values the past as much as the future, knows Brisbane like the back of his hand, and who believes this is a city worth investing in.