Redesigning city’s forgotten spaces

Stephen Moorcroft was drawn to a career in architecture by the opportunity it presented to influence people’s experiences of the spaces they shared.

The Hames Sharley principal focuses on workplace design, helping shape offices around Perth. During his three years at the helm of the firm’s workplace portfolio, Mr Moorcroft has played a hand in designing Dexus’s 240 St Georges Terrace, 140 William Street for the state government, NEXTDC data centre, and Royal Perth Hospital’s clinical command centre.

The former Design Institute of Australia chair learned his craft in the UK in the late 1990s, with his first foray into architecture at Lawray Architects, a small firm in London’s south-west that designs heritage-style mansions for the wealthy.

“It was on top of a bottle shop in Hammersmith, really dodgy digs, but their client list was extraordinary, some of the richest people in the world,” Mr Moorcroft told Business News.

At just 18, Mr Moorcroft was involved in the final design stages of a £100 million Kensington Palace Gardens mansion, owned by British-Iranian scholar Sir Nasser David Khalili, who sold it to British business magnate and former chief executive of the Formula One Group, Bernie Ecclestone.

The 5,110 square metre home featuring marble from the same quarry used for the Taj Mahal is now owned by Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal.

“Like most 18 year olds I don’t think I appreciated [at the time] the opportunity and what I learned from some wonderfully talented and patient people,” Mr Moorcroft said.

“The scale of this house in terms of location, size and cost was mind blowing.”

The new Hames Sharley offices on Hay Street. Photo: Hames Sharley. 

Early starter

In his childhood and youth, Mr Moorcroft told Business News, he spent his time building as much as possible. “I was always making stuff; I flippantly blame Lego,” he said.

“[Even now] I do loads of carpentry at home … creating things that are useful: wardrobes, cubby houses, bunk beds, sheds, fences, stairs.”

In London, Mr Moorcroft spent a year at Lawray as an architectural assistant, before starting his university degree in architecture.

About 18 months on, in 2000, he secured a part-time job via a recruitment agency to support his studies at CUH2A, now HDR Architects, which specialises in science and technology design.

“I was an office junior, answering the phone for a big American firm I had never heard of,” Mr Moorcroft said.

“I left them five years later.”

CUH2A’s London office serviced the UK offices of Pfizer, providing the then 21-year-old architecture assistant with an insight into laboratory design.

“I wasn’t fully qualified by the time I left them but had already worked on massive heritage residential houses and a couple of much smaller pharmaceutical buildings,” he said.

“I don’t think you could get any more opposite, but I just bounced between them.”

Mr Moorcroft joined UK firm Pringle and Brandon in 2004 where he spent six years before moving on in 2010. (The workplace interior specialist firm merged into Perkins+Will in 2012.)

“It was the kind of job I took thinking, ‘I’ll be here for two years and then move to another sector altogether’, but I stayed on for six [years] finding I really enjoyed it,” he said.

Drawn to the immediacy of workplace architecture and its ability to affect the culture of organisations, Mr Moorcroft has not looked back.

“The enormity of what we do, and the fact that we can actually impact people’s happiness, comfort level, resilience, how they work with their colleagues, it’s really powerful,” he said.

“You can have all these great philosophies on how the work you do impacts human beings and human behaviour, and hopefully helps people or generates opportunities for people, and so often we actually get to [do] that.

“And in my own sphere of workplace, it’s faster. Often the things we brief a client about one day we design the next, so they can be on site very quickly.”

At Pringle and Brandon, Mr Moorcroft worked on fitouts for financial institutions Barclays, Morgan Stanley, ICE Futures, and Bang Capital.

In 2010, he joined Macquarie Bank in the UK as an in-house architect after doing some consulting work with the finance giant.

This work eventually led him to Perth, via a nine-month stint at Macquarie in Sydney. Global firm Hassell lured Mr Moorcroft to Western Australia.

He worked in Hassell’s Perth office from 2014 to 2018 as head of its interiors team.

Among the work he undertook were office design projects for Chevron, Rio Tinto, EY, KMPG, Wesfarmers, Woodside, Morgan Stanley and the University of Western Australia.

Mr Moorcroft’s work with Hassell ranged from a 400sqm office space for Morgan Stanley to a 30,000sqm fitout with Rio Tinto.

“It was a huge difference in the kind of work; it keeps you on your toes when you’re jumping between those jobs,” he said.

When Hames Sharley was looking for an architect to run its new workplace division in Perth, Mr Moorcroft was an ideal fit.

“The opportunity here was to build a workplace portfolio from scratch, so it was very different,” he said.

“It’s nothing like being able to walk into a meeting backed by a Hassell, which did the biggest and second biggest offices in the country … we don’t have that firepower, but we’re slowly building it, with a slightly different culture.”

Hames Sharley designed the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage offices at 140 William Street. Photo: Hames Sharley. 

Office move

Mr Moorcroft was instrumental in reshaping Hames Sharley’s offices when the firm relocated from Subiaco to the CBD last year, revitalising a space that had been disused for 35 years.

He said the shift to Hay Street Mall provided an opportunity to create a template for a new Hames Sharley workplace aligning with the culture of the national organisation.

“We used our full workplace briefing process on ourselves, which is pretty rare for designers to do,” Mr Moorcroft said.

“You are usually so worried about all the other work you are doing that you get backed into a corner.”

Mr Moorcroft referred to his team as like “moths to flames” when it came to selecting the most suitable space.

“Every building we went to, we were getting quite excited about what we could do, and then having a horrible feeling that there’s actually no way we can afford to take that and turn it into what we want,” he said.

In February 2021, as the firm announced it would repurpose the Coles Myer building, owned by the Humich family, Hames Sharley senior associate Jessika Hames described the refurbishment as something “only a bunch of architects would want to take on”.

The firm was drawn to the 1,100sqm space across two floors for its proximity to public transport and clients, and the potential to develop a neglected part of the CBD.

“Hay Street Mall needs to reinvent itself,” Ms Hames said at the time.

“We have this amazing history there, examples of heritage architecture that have been lying dormant for over 40 years.”

Mr Moorcroft described the move as a complete repositioning for the firm.

“I talk about it as actually practising what we preach,” he said.

“We have always talked to clients who are reflecting their context and how we can improve their business and we have gone through exactly the same process and delivered it on ourselves.”

The office is set up for a range of work settings to support the activities of Hames Sharley’s 85 WA staff, and Mr Moorcroft described the fitout as a work in progress.

“The nuances of being able to impact how people go about their day, and hopefully have a better experience, I find quite fascinating and sometimes very surprising,” he said.

“I don’t think you always know how space is going to get used until you’re in it, [and] because this is so dramatically different to where we were, behaviours have changed.”

Revitalising Perth

Mr Moorcroft said the way the architecture firm repurposed unused space could be replicated across Perth’s CBD. He described Hay Street Mall as “the heart of the CBD”, which should be far better used than it is.

“Along the mall there are loads of upper floors that are just sitting there vacant,” Mr Moorcroft said.

“There should be more thought given to how we re-use spaces like this, that are in absolute prime position … waiting to be resurrected.

“It is going to require a lot of people to work together and drop some differences … because we’ve got loads of small spaces with unique owners, and it’s [about] how we can create a vision across the Perth CBD.”

Hames Sharley helped the City of Perth survey Perth’s unused heritage buildings, prompting an initiative to help revive some of those spaces.

A City of Perth spokesperson said the council was in the process of formulating a grants program to incentivise investment in these disused spaces.

“The first half of 2022 will be spent working on the mechanics of the grant program, including eligibility and assessment criteria,” the spokesperson said.

The Heritage Adaptive Reuse grants are expected to be available by July this year.