Interview by Hamish McDougall
Darren Mills, director of design-led construction company Cadence & Co, finished a home in Palm Beach for a client earlier this year and caught up with him over a drink not long after. He expected to hear about the lounge room or the kitchen. Instead, the client described his three grown children gathering in a bar that hadn’t existed in the old house, one of them getting up mid-conversation to pour his father a drink he hadn’t asked for. “All his feedback about the project we’d delivered for them was about the experiences he got with his family,” Mills says.
Cadence & Co is a design-and-construct studio operating in Sydney and the Southern Highlands. For Mills and design principal Michael Kilkeary, almost every project—whether a kitchen renovation or a decade-long investment thesis—begins with the same question: what does the client actually want from their house? More often than not, the answer is different from what they first asked for.