Fitzpatrick + Partners Studio

“We’re very much known for the big picture right down to the detail, and I think designing into a new place where we’re going to live, it was very important that the studio express what we are, where we’re going and what we do.

We are on a pathway towards becoming carbon neutral, and so the selection of the materials was really important to us. Both for the physicality of the material, what it offers in terms of that carbon neutrality and the journey, but also what it says to our clients.

Tasmanian timber offers such a wide range of products for many, many different uses, so tends to be our go-to to start with, but also we get great support from the local industry. We can actually talk to the owners, the designers, the craftsmen of the products, and say, what about? how can we do this? what’s your opinion? It’s always that openness to explore, and if they don’t know, there’s always someone down there on the end of the line that can give us those answers.

The entry wall and the ceiling are all solid Tas Oak profiles, so it’s very much built like a stud wall with bearers and bracing, but we just closed up the centres and then got a bit smart, so we did all the engineering and cutting of the works with the CNC machines and all the fixings come from the back, so it’s a very fine combination of a great product and some smart engineering.

We worked with Simon Ancher. Simon’s a Launceston-based furniture designer. Fantastic portfolio work, easy person to work with, can-do attitude. We’ve got some lovely pieces in all our work stools scattered around the studio, some meeting room furniture with leather cushions, and then all our breakout spaces as well, done by Simon.

One of the key decisions was the floor and being an architectural studio, there are endless choices of materials. It’s a Tas Oak floor, but it’s laid on a plywood backing. It’s an efficient use of timber, we weren’t wasting a valuable resource. Fantastic for an office environment in that it gave us a great speed of delivery, so the planks arrived, they were laid, they’re pre-finished, we didn’t have to worry about sanding floors and that made it possible to put it into a work environment on a very large area, where it’s over 700 square metres of the flooring here, in an efficient time.

The light colours that the Tassie Oak offers allow reflected light back up onto the ceiling and back indirectly into the workspace, and then into the evenings, the warmer tones are picked up in the Tassie Oak and it really enhances that comfort, warmth.

People actually now come in and visit and say, wow, look at that timber floor. Yeah, right. Why did we always start putting carpet into working environments? It seems a crazy thing to do.”

James Fitzpatrick (Principal), Fitzpatrick + Partners (Sydney)