Design Your Life with Vince Frost

What does it take to lead one of the UK’s oldest and most respected architectural practices into the future? 

As CEO of Scott Brownrigg, Darren Comber has steered the 115-year-old practice through change, challenge and reinvention. From its early roots in Guildford to a network of studios spanning Amsterdam, London, New York, Singapore and Riyadh, Darren has played a pivotal role in shaping its global presence. 

Wit...

What if the true measure of success isn’t scale, but connection? 

From a childhood spent in expat compounds of Saudi Arabia to founding one of Australia’s most admired design studios, Jeremy Bull, founder and principal of Alexander &CO., has designed far more than homes, he’s designed a life rooted in meaning, craftsmanship and human connection. 

After overcoming years of illness and self-destruction...

What does it mean to create objects that tell stories, that shape how we feel, live, and connect?

For Gabriel Hendifar, Artistic Director and Co-Founder of APPARATUS, design is about more than beautiful lighting and furniture, it’s about creating the container for human experience. 

Born in Los Angeles to Iranian immigrants, his early world was filled with music, memory, and craft, influences that continue to inform his ...

How do you go from almost joining the Marines, to leading the world’s largest hospitality design firm? 

Born in Yorkshire and now based in Singapore, Chris Godfrey’s story is one of creative grit, adaptability and quiet determination. From humble beginnings as a teenage print boy in an architectural practice, to founding his own studio, to now serving as Co-CEO of HBA, the global design powerhouse behind some of th...

What does it mean to shape culture through design?  

For Peter Saville CBE, one of the most influential designers of our time, it has always been about perception. From his early work at Factory Records, crafting the visual identities of Joy Division and New Order, to collaborations with fashion houses like Yohji Yamamoto, Burberry, Calvin Klein and Chanel, Saville has consistently redefined how we experience music, fashi...

How do you build a design career that spans continents, cultures and scale, and then redesign your life after a wake-up call? 

Rido Pin is a Director at Plus Studio, a solutions company for the built environment, with 11 studios across Australia and New Zealand and projects worldwide. Originally from the Netherlands, Rido’s journey has taken him from cycling the fields of Holland, to island life in Curaçao, to New...

What happens when you combine a love of design with a mind for business? For Ajaz Ahmed, it meant building one of the world’s most successful creative companies from scratch before starting all over again. 

Ajaz is the visionary founder of AKQA, the global digital agency that he grew to 5,000 staff across 30 countries. After three decades at the helm, he stepped down and launched Studio One, an agile new venture built fo...

Growing up in North London in the 80s, no one was talking about art or design. Life was about conversations with neighbours on the street, the good and the not so good. Four decades later, Paul Cocksedge’s work is grounded in these formative years. Known for his unorthodox approach to materials in works that span public art, sculpture and architectural installation, everything he designs is about human connection.

Paul founde...

When Elad Yifrach was growing up his art teacher mother would entertain he and his sisters by setting up art projects on their dining room table. It wasn’t long before his bedroom was home to stacks of magazines covered in sticky notes, and he was studying a unique architecture and interior design course at Technion, “kind of like the MIT of Israel”.

Yifrach is the Founder and Creative Director of L’OBJET, w...

Keith Hempel always knew he was going to be an architect. Growing up in Southern California with a creative mother and a technical father, he seemed destined for the vocation. A transformative, “eye opening” and “earth shattering” year studying the craft in Florence set him on his way.   

 Today, he helps lead a cohort of over 500 architects, engineers, landscape architects, interior designers and plann...

As a teenager, Dr Michael Brand experienced moving from Canberra to Washington as both traumatic and exciting. It was on a journey back to Australia via family in Nepal with his brother, they were aged 15 and 18 respectively, that he first experienced Islamic art. He can trace a direct line from that experience to his field of study and life’s work.

Brand has recently retired as Director of the Art Gallery of NSW, after guidi...

The question of living well is a big one. What does it actually mean? For Eva-Marie Prineas, home is where the heart is, and the way a home is planned has the most impact in how it feels to inhabit when it’s complete.

Prineas founded her eponymous architecture practice in 2004. Perhaps unsurprising considering she would sit in the back yard of her family home in suburban Sydney and sketch the roofline. Her background and pass...

Lily Froehlicher inherited a love of luxury from her mother and a passion for travel from her father—interests that shaped her desire to create beautiful experiences for others. After studying in Paris, Shanghai, and London, and gaining experience at Hermès and Chanel, she joined Invisible Collection at its inception.  

Now Managing Director, she leads the online platform connecting design lovers with handmad...

Once a music-obsessed kid dreaming of designing record covers, Chris Law found his rhythm in the world of sneakers. The iconic shoe designer, known by everyone who’s anyone in the sneaker world, shares how hip-hop culture, graphic design, and a love for storytelling led him to work on some of the most famous sneaker designs, ever. “Icons that are so big in the history of sneakers,” including the Adidas Superstar a...

Growing up in public housing on Roosevelt Island in the middle of New York City’s East River, Elie Gamburg went to sleep every night staring at the city’s remarkable skyline from his bedroom window. His father was an artist and his mother a mathematician, so, “I guess I sort of had to do architecture if nothing else.”  

Gamburg is a Design Principal at KPF, a global architecture firm known for designing...

As an architect, are you influenced by the environment you grew up in, even if your work looks vastly different to where you spent your formative years? John Pawson thinks so. He grew up in the north of England in the 1950s with his four sisters, playing with kids from houses around their family home. Despite being a master of minimalism, he grew up in a house that was quite the opposite. 

John Pawson CBE has spent over forty ...

Children of immigrants are often hard workers; they’re under pressure to live up to their parents’ dreams. And it’s often thought that creativity and hard work don’t go hand in hand.

Jean Lin has proven quite the opposite. Growing up in Massachusetts she was aware she came from a different place to her friends. But she credits her different upbringing, one focused on valuing family, hard work, integrity, wit...

Is it better to start a business with a fully fleshed out plan? Or can passion be the driver for success? In the case of George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg, intent is everything. And you can achieve global success and excellence in your field “while still being fun and nice”.

The partners in business and life founded their international creative design studio, Yabu Pushelberg, in 1980 with curiosity, passion and energy, a...

Does having a social agenda matter when you’re a landscape architect? At first, you may not think so. But when you truly understand the impact a compassionate designer can make on the spaces we inhabit, the answer is clear.

Sacha Coles is a Global Design Director at ASPECT Studios and founder of the design practice’s Sydney studio. As a global design influencer, Sacha leads projects of transformational change spanning p...