Refurbishing an historic Geelong building helped a firm of local architects achieve national prominence.
|
Entrepreneur: Max Gurrie, Director
Company: McGlashan Everist
Business type: Architectural and planning services
Founded: 1955
Turnover: Under $2M
Head office: Carlton and Geelong, Victoria
Contact details: +61 3 5221 3144
The McGlashan Everist Story
When McGlashan Everist won the Royal Australian Institute of Architects award for Australia’s best recycled building in 1997, architecture critic Neville Quarry wrote how good it was to see the old firm back in the awards. (The firm had won several prestigious awards for residential projects in the 1960s.) The 1997 award was for recycling the 100-year-old Geelong Woolstores complex into a spectacular waterfront campus for Deakin University.
|
Key learning points:
- Marketing - Provide marketable stories that link the community values of a business to local achievements.
- Client relationships - Promote long-term client relationships.
- Enhance business credibility - Helping to attract new and significant clients.
|
|
McGlashan Everist’s Geelong-based director, Max Gurrie says: “Recycling is really taking something the majority of people would consider defunct, redundant, a lame duck, beyond its use-by date, recognising the value that’s in it, and using innovative ways of redefining the space, material and quality to ensure another use. That was very much the case with the wool stores. We definitely market our ability in adaptive re-use and the fact that we have had this success in recycling buildings.”
McGlashan Everist’s directors don’t claim to be incredibly responsible architects because they saved an historic building from the wreckers. They simply take it for granted that they should do this type of difficult and demanding work. The firm’s approach to marketing its social responsibility - in this case, recognising what is of value in an existing building and transforming that to a new function - is as subtle as the changes which turned the old Woolstores into a modern place of higher learning.
Gurrie says: “In terms of marketing, the Woolstores has been a major turnaround [for the firm] for a number of reasons. We took basically an industrial building and turned it into a centre for high technology. You can’t think of two greater extremes than a building designed originally for wool lumpers to walk around in the dark pushing trolleys full of wool - and now the pomp and ceremony and technical expertise of a university. And in this town, there’s the social change in one of Geelong’s major exports. One hundred years ago it was wool; now it is education. And there are marketable stories when you draw those parallels.”
Continuity is important to the firm. Its association with Deakin University goes back to 1975 and it has kept some clients since the early 1960s. It has maintained a high profile in education, with repeated commissions from clients such as Geelong College, Launceston Grammar and Wesley College.
Gurrie explains: “We hope we are doing the right thing. We have never had to advertise as such. I suppose, working for secondary schools whose campuses may be 100 years old and have quality buildings, [is the reason] why we get so many reappointments. Schools keep us because we recognise the quality of the environment they have already got. We don’t try and establish some architectural ego. Rather it’s about designing within the context of the environment into which you are thrust.”
The firm’s socially responsible approach has attracted new clients such as Geelong’s St Joseph’s College. The firm advised the college to adopt identifiable character based on its orange-coloured brick buildings.
Since completing the Woolstores project and winning the RAIA award, the firm has been regularly short-listed for some very prestigious projects. The Victorian Government invited the firm’s submission for the refurbishment of No 4 Treasury Place, a significant state building in Melbourne. Says Gurrie: “We came second, but to have been invited at that level indicates that the Government reckons we are doing the right thing and have the capacity to tackle projects of that scale.”