Each year, the Illawarra Festival of Architecture & Design (IFAD) invites the community to take a closer look at the built environment, and to ask a deeper question: how do the places we design shape the lives we live?
In 2025, the festival returns with a theme that does exactly that — Inside Out: Landscape & Life — exploring how architecture, interiors, and landscapes work together to shape not just homes, but communities, culture, and country.
Stuart Scobie is one of the creative minds behind this year’s festival. As both a director and landscape architect at acclaimed South Coast architecture firm, Edmiston Jones, he brings a big-picture perspective that’s all about working with nature, not against it.
“This year’s festival explores the different ways design can bring us closer to the places we live and the landscape of the Illawarra,” says Scobie. “One of the biggest shifts we’re seeing is a growing connection to Country. There’s a real recognition now that Indigenous knowledge holds deep value and can profoundly shape the way we design and build.”
Designing with — not just on — Country
For Scobie, one of the most powerful shifts in recent years is a growing recognition within the design professions that Country is not a blank canvas to be used, but a living, breathing presence to be respected and worked with.
“I lean toward the definition that Country is family,” he explains. “From a design point of view, that means we approach everything with a sense of care, as if the landscape was a member of our family. You treat it with a long-term perspective.”
This philosophy stands in contrast to older, extractive models of design, which informed attitudes of domination and control and seeing the land as a commodity rather than as a contributing to a culture. Increasingly, says Scobie, designers are moving towards more responsible, regenerative practices.
“We now have a better understanding of sustainability. But we’re going beyond that, working toward regenerative design. That includes measuring the total emissions of a project, choosing materials that reflect the character of place, and designing with themes and principles that honour both the natural and cultural context.”
One influential step forward, Scobie notes, is the NSW Government Architect’s “Designing with Country” policy, which is a set of principles for working on state significant projects in collaboration with Indigenous communities.
“It’s a genuine invitation to see Aboriginal people as stakeholders in the design process,” he says. “Their input helps us understand how people historically interacted with Country — where they gathered food, how they moved across the land, the key destinations, water sources, plants and animals — it all gives us a much richer sense of context.”
Trends with depth: Materiality, resilience, and regeneration
These insights are not just philosophical, they translate into very real design decisions. In a recent project in Kangaroo Valley, Scobie used hardwood timbers and bushfire-resilient plantings to create a tourism development that felt anchored in its setting, both physically and culturally.
“It was a bush retreat with temporary, tourism accommodation where the materiality was drawn from the local context that reflected the land’s character and history,” he says. “Design decisions. Every element has a purpose — the plant selection, the shape of the buildings,, the way they encouraged people to move between them, the landscape design were all based on themes that tell a story of the area and its history. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. Nothing’s cookiecutter. It’s also powerfully Australian.”
In that sense, Scobie argues that good design is increasingly synonymous with responsible design. And importantly, it’s not just about large-scale architecture. These ideas can apply at any level — from big civic projects to a small native plant on a balcony. “One of the single biggest actions an individual can take is simply to observe,” says Scobie. “Look hard at the natural world around you. Nature often does a far better job of design than we do — so why not emulate it? “You might plant a native lime in a pot. That alone contributes to biodiversity. It’s a small act, but small things, done often, can make a big difference. The hardest part is getting started. “There is so much I’m looking forward to discussing at the festival, in terms of native plant knowledge and design with site context, but in how we think about Place altogether — how we care for it, how we move through it, and how we listen to it.”
The Illawarra Festival of Architecture & Design runs from 18–19 October 2025.
For full program details and ticketing, visit www.ifad.net.au
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