2 February 202130 March 2023 by Mairead Murphy

Case Study 03: The Big Questions

Designing and building your dream home is a long process and at times a tough one. Along the way you may question why you’re even doing it and what you’re hoping to achieve. At times like this, having the answers to these big questions will help you to stay focussed on the end goal of living happily in your home.

Some big questions you might want to ask are:

What value does our new home give us as a family?

What has motivated our decision to create a bespoke family home?

What am I worried about / looking forward to?

When I’m in my new home, how will it make me feel?

It is important to discuss these goals with everyone who will be making decisions. If you are building with a partner, do you know if you have different ideas of what will make the project a success? If so, you will be approaching each element of the design with a different criterion. Understanding these criteria will allow you discuss the design with empathy for other perspectives. This will also allow you to understand where you each may be able to compromise to accommodate the other.

CASE STUDY 1:

We used the technique of ‘100 sentences’ to answer the big question of what we value as a design practice. The goal is to be able to write down 100 sentences that answer your question.

Using one of the examples above – “Our new home will bring us value by…”

or in our case, “At Maike Design we strive to…”

You can read the full outline of the method and where we ended up here.

CASE STUDY 2:

Our Next Door House 2 is a small footprint house for a family of 4. The original weatherboard house was built in the late 1940s. It was dilapidated and dark with minimal connection to the exterior. The block sloped sharply along the length of the house down to a completely concreted yard.

The brief was to keep the footprint of the house at 90 square meters to maintain as much of the backyard as possible. With space at a premium and two small children, decisions had to be made about what was important to the family.

Going into the project we ensured everyone had a clear sense of what would make this home a success. In this case, it was to create a unique, beautifully detailed and functional family home in a small footprint that would be a joy to live in.

To take on this delightful but quite abstract goal, we identified physical attributes that our design would need to address:

– Maintain the house size and provide convertible, functional space to adapt to growing children.

– Create a sense of calm throughout the interiors.

– Accentuate the limited connection to the exterior and natural light wherever possible.

– Upgrade the original building to a high standard to ensure a comfortable and efficient house.

This understanding enabled us to approach the design pragmatically. Throughout the process, keeping these goals in focus made decision making easier. The finished project aligned with the brief criteria to create a beautiful home, suited to the family now and into the future.

We love hearing about your projects no matter what stage you’re at.

If you’d like to have a chat about your project you can book in a free phone or video chat with Mairead.

If you’ve just started out thinking about your new home have a look at our free 4-week guide – How to: Clearly Define Your Design Brief.

18 October 201916 June 2025 by Mairead Murphy

Hello, let me introduce myself

Hi,

Thanks for visiting.

These posts will be a place to share our design inspiration, current work and updates on how we are developing as a studio.

I didn’t aspire to running a design practice when I first started my career. I had always imagined myself working in a large, established practice. I wasn’t a business person, I was a designer – so starting Maike Design wasn’t a well planned or particularly well executed undertaking.

First of all, I’ll step a little further back for a minute… After working in a huge team to deliver a multi billion dollar project, I had just landed a job at my favourite Architecture firm. My dream job. I had been wanting to work for this practice since first started studying design. Their work is amazing and I was a little star struck just being in their offices. At the same time, I started my Architecture Masters so was working part time and studying full time. A couple of months in, as a result of the exhausting long hours on the previous project my body just packed in. My immune system stopped regulating itself, my face swelled up like I’d been stung by a bee and I could barely make it through the day without needing to have a sleep. It wasn’t great.

I was trying to work out how I was going to balance my health, work and study (and who knows, maybe even have a little bit of time for some life) when the opportunity to do my own project came up. It seemed to be the answer I was looking for. I could balance various deadlines without being tied to normal office hours.

And that is how I started.

I was only trying to replace a part time wage while I was studying. This eased the financial transition but didn’t provide much scope to employ outside help. Like many lean start up practices, I have been doing everything myself while also trying to do the actual project work. I built a passable template website, designed my own logo, set up all my own documents and have an embarrassingly clumsy excel spreadsheet where I keep track of my profit and loss.

As well as starting financially lean, I started lean on time. Until now, this has been a part time venture. Since starting Maike Design I have also finished my Architecture Masters, built and run a shared workspace, renovated (sometimes actually on the tools) two houses for my partner and our family, had two babies and started an Illustration practice. This is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to stop and examine my business to see what it can do when given some full time attention.

While I still have projects running at various stages I have been making sure I take time to spend with my new little family. Right now, as I’m writing this our second baby is 4 months old and she’s asleep on a pillow on my lap.

I have decided to use this period as an opportunity to completely renovate my business, examine every part of my process and overhaul my systems and templates. I’ve always been a very organised person but lately I’ve gone from being not-a-business-person, to an obsessive business podcast consumer, an enthusiastic systems junkie and a hesitant but optimistic planner of future success.

I’ve found that while there is an overwhelming amount of general business information available, there is very little discussion around this aspect of architectural practice beyond the traditionally taught processes. I don’t think these should be automatically assumed to be the best way of doing things. For Maike Design Studio I particularly want to create a project process that puts an emphasis on making time for creative exploration, client involvement and communicating the value that thoughtful design decisions can bring to any built outcome.

I’d love to start an open and frank discussion with anyone interested about alternative methods of delivering architectural projects. Hopefully we can share our ideas of what it takes to set up and maintain a successful design practice. I hope that by documenting my journey here it might be helpful to someone in their business.

See you again soon!