With a design eye that takes them from Brisbane to Byron Bay and beyond, Hogg & Lamb are one of the region’s most exciting architectural design practices. We’re proud to work with the team on our Daniels Street project, a collaboration with Owen Wright and Kita Alexander’s Paradiso Property and Integra Projects.

At Daniels Street, Hogg & Lamb have designed four distinct and separate houses, united with a consistent vision that celebrates warmth and materiality, creating one-of-a-kind beach homes.

We sat down with co-founder Michael Hogg to discuss the practice’s distinct approach.

First up, how did Hogg & Lamb come into being?

I’d been working at well-known architectural firm Donovan Hill when I was a student and spent 15 years there working on some amazing projects. I met Greg Lamb there, as he was working there too. One thing led to another and we ended up deciding to start our own practice in 2015.

I’m a registered architect in NSW and Queensland and have extensive experience in residential projects, including as Project Architect for the Robin Boyd awarded D House. I have spent a lot of time in the conceptual, schematic and design development phases of projects.

Greg is an interior designer who worked at several firms in Australia and the UK before I met him. His experience is really vast including restaurants and bars, office, hotels and much more.

Together it is a partnership and collaboration that just works. We share a vision and desire to work with people who want to do good things.

You are fantastic at considering the little details of how we live when designing. Is this a big part of your approach?

We tend to role play quite a lot how the building is going to be used and what is going to happen in it on a daily basis. We consider carefully how people live their lives and the things they need to do. And we then consider how our projects help that to occur.

Daniels Street is designed around the idea that when you are living together as a family you want to have places where you can be together at once, but then places you can be alone. The ground floor is designed as a space where everyone can get together, with the lounge a little separate so you can hear what’s happening but not be ‘in it’. Given these are holiday homes, you want to be able to enable people to come together and spend time apart, so everyone isn’t on top of each other. We like to consider the internal dynamics of groups of people.

Is there a particular Hogg and Lamb style?

The style of our projects is dependent on what the client is interested in. The J&J Residence has a big, rammed earth wall running through the middle of the house. The clients came without much of a brief except they loved rammed earth. We’d never done a project with it, but we made it a feature – this one is 40 metres long, two storeys high and in the middle of the house. We thought, rather than put it outside, lets put it in the middle so day-to-day you can interact with it.

On the other end of the scale is the B&B Residence, which is very minimal and white. The clients loved white so we went with what they like. The shape and volume of the spaces define the rooms, rather than the finishes. And when your brain sees colour, it looks really vibrant and amazing.

I like to think what we do is like cooking or being in a restaurant and finding out what ingredients clients like, taking those away and combining them to create something new.

What excites you about our Daniels Street project?

What is great is that these are separate houses, rather than duplexes – which is really unique in the small multi-residential space in Byron. There are no shared walls. Each of the homes is very private from each other and tailored to their orientation to maximise winter sun and breezes. With townhouses, you often end up with darker interiors because you can’t put as many windows and doors, which isn’t an issue at Daniels Street.