BAY WATCH

Immersed in celebrated Byron Bay, this architect’s barefoot sensibility embraces diversity, sustainability and engagement with the elements

- KAREN McCARTNEY

DOMINIC FINLAY- JONES and I go way back. In 2000 my husband and I bought a modest but notable house by pioneering modernist architect Bruce Rickard on Sydney’s North Shore. Dominic had worked alongside Rickard for eight years at a formative period early in his career. We took house tours together and bonded over our mutual appreciation of the Rickard oeuvre.

“It was a fully immersive experience [working] with Bruce. Shopping with Bruce, cooking with Bruce, making coffee and generally absorbing his humanist attitude to life as much as to architecture,” explains Dominic, now principal of his own firm, DFJ Architects, in Byron Bay.

Dominic, alongside architect Nick Kent, worked under the Rickard edict of “Draw what you know, then come back to me”. This hands-off, low-intervention approach conveyed the trust Rickard had in them to do the heavy lifting in the practice, and Dominic says it was also an incredible learning spurt for young graduate architects. “The overwhelming feeling for me was that I was part of a family and an architectural community,” he says.

My interview for this story is conducted with a 16,500km distance between us. I am rugged up, nursing a cup of tea on a chill London spring morning while Dominic has a certain post-work ease having come directly from a beach barbeque. His move to Bangalow in 2007, and subsequently Byron Bay, came when his daughter was three years old, and a job came up with an engineering firm wanting to engage with an architectural practice.