“In Seniors Living, good design extends residents’ ability to live independent lives.”

Lydia is a hands-on, collaborative Senior Architect with more than 13 years’ experience in Seniors Living & Care, a design specialisation she’s passionate about for its ability to improve residents’ quality of life. Efficient and collaborative, she ensures her teams produce technically sound, well-coordinated documentation that help builders achieve a high-quality result for the client.

It’s tempting to say Lydia was destined for architecture. As a child she’d cut out house plans from the newspaper and draw them for herself, fascinated by the way the spaces related to one another. At school she loved all the hands-on subjects, where she could design and create anything from food to technical drawings. (She clearly still loves both.)

Ideally Lydia’s on-site as much as possible, collaborating with builders and watching her drawings come to life. She looks for ways to mentor younger architects, sharing knowledge and opportunities, and enjoys keeping teams motivated, positive, well trained and efficient.

It was her thesis on the way architecture can aid health and healing that led her into design for seniors early in her career. Her mum’s experience as a nurse in the sector sealed the deal. Lydia has witnessed extraordinary changes in models of care and approaches to design over the past decade or so, and is excited by the evolution from institutional places driven by efficiencies in staffing and floorplans to far more domestic-scale spaces where good design offers residents better choices, more independence and enhanced quality of life. At each project’s end there’s nothing more rewarding for her than striking up conversations with residents, families and staff about life in their new home and workplace.