| 63 T T Hugh de Lacy Ensuring a pleasurable experience for the client Lindsey Carew recently re-branded his firm to Foundry from Collaborative Architecture. Foundry Architecture ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN Building a house should be fun, an enjoyable experience, says Lindsey Carew of Te Awamutu’s Foundry Architecture, and he’s spent his career trying to make it just that for new home-owners. Lindsey recently re-branded his firm to Foundry from Collaborative Architecture, even though his original firm’s name expressed his personal commitment to making house-building a pleasurable experience for the client. “Collaborative Architecture was just too long a name, but the main reason for the re-branding was to create a more cohesive brand as we prepared to expand our service to further improve the build process for our clients,” he says. In changing the name to Foundry Architecture Lindsey was also influenced by the end of the post-Covid building boom, coupled with the passing over a two-month period at the end of last year of four relatives and friends to whom he was close. This combination of events led to his down-sizing to work by himself, after earlier having a staff of three. Lindsey is the son of a sharemilker, and that meant moving round from farm to farm during his youth, and then working in the industry himself after he left school. But he’d loved technical drawing at high school, and while working 60 hours a week on the farm he completed the first year of the National Diploma in Architectural Technology in 2003, but a law change made the diploma redundant. Then in December 2007 he had a farm bike accident, putting him out of farm-work for six months, and giving him the opportunity to complete a six-month course in architectural drafting run by the New Zealand Welding School in Rotorua. He then took on a three-weeks trial with local firm Architectural Design, run by David Peehikuru, and at the end of it was hired as a technician. He was with that firm from 2008 to 2011 before being made redundant in the economic downturn of the time, so he moved to Cambridge and the commercial and landscape architectural company Environ. By 2015 though, and “hungry to be more involved in residential design,” he returned to Architectural Design, and the following year gained his Licensing Building Practitioner (LBP) qualifications. Lindsey finally went out on his own in 2017, firstly as Collaborative and then as Foundry Architecture. The business grew rapidly, to the degree that he felt he was losing touch with the very home-owners he wanted to help most closely through the building process. Hence the decision to re-brand and go solo. “What I really like is to offer the complete service to the home-builder from get-go, to see them through it without the stress and frustration that often makes it a negative experience for people. “I’ve made it point of difference in an industry where the process of building a home is often a bit of a rush, seemingly stuck in a pricing structure frame of mind. “What I offer with Foundry Architecture is the flexibility to make a home build an enjoyable experience for the client,” Lindsey says.
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