Bespoke Careers Podcast

Shajay Bhooshan is an Associate Director at ZHA Architects and co-founder of ZHA CODE, the practice's computation and design research group, now 28 people inside a studio of around 500.
He studied at the AA's Design Research Laboratory, where he still teaches, and completed his PhD with the Block Research Group at ETH Zurich. His work spans high performance geometry, robotic fabrication, game engines and participatory design, including the 3D printed concrete bridge Striatus.

Scott Clement has seen thousands of portfolios. He doesn't want to see yours.Scott is the CEO of Revel Architecture and Design, a San Francisco firm that grew headcount 50% in 18 months and is sitting right at the 60-person point where he says firms start to break. We get into what an architecture CEO does all day, why Revel grows its leaders instead of hiring them in, the Colliers fit-out that ended with a giant bar the client insisted they didn't want, and the phone call that came 14 hours before we recorded.

Cara Stizza and Robyn Levin run Wildflower, a Melbourne studio that owns the furniture side of a project. Selection, procurement, coordination, everything down to the cutlery in the drawers. Cara built and grew an interior design practice before this. Robyn spent years inside one of Australia's leading furniture brands. Together they sit between the creative eye and the part where it all has to get built, on budget, and hold up.This one's about the business of design. How they cut about a third out of a build-to-rent budget without gutting the design. Why furniture gets wedged in early, before it turns into an afterthought. What they look for when they hire for a job that's half taste, half operations. And what stays human when AI can knock out a mood board in seconds.

Want to work at amazing studios like Made For? You can browse our live jobs here: https://www.bespokecareers.com/jobs/At Bespoke we work with 1,000+ firms every year across the UK, US and Australia to find them great candidates just like you. Want to know where you salary sits in the market? Download our global Salary Guide: https://www.bespokecareers.com/salary-guide
Mitch Jones built Made For, a Melbourne workplace strategy, architecture and interiors studio, without a design degree. Ten years on it's a team of twenty with a client list that runs from Starbucks to Autex to Yarra Valley Water.
He started it with his wife Cara in a rundown Collingwood warehouse, and in this episode he's straight about the whole ten years. Why he's kept every pitch he's ever made. Why he wants to own less than half his own company. The hiring mistake he keeps making and regretting. How he reads a business before he designs a single desk.
We get into what changed for offices after Covid, why he runs a studio that's built to not look like an office, and the part of the job he's certain AI won't touch.
"Do you need a design degree to run a design business? You don't. In fact, I've got no degree at all."

Selasi Setufe came out of architecture school with two degrees and couldn't get a job. Two interviews in two years. An unpaid internship in Slovenia she'd "highly not advise." So she stopped trying to fit the mould and built her own route through the profession.Selasi is a co-director of Black Females in Architecture, the network she co-founded in 2018 that now runs to a global membership of more than 400. She's a registered architect, a Public Practice alumna, and a Principal Project Officer in the GLA's Place Unit, after years as a Senior Architect at Be First in Barking and Dagenham. In 2022 she was awarded an MBE for services to diversity in architecture.In this conversation she gets into the two years she spent outside architecture after qualifying, the advice from Elsie Owusu about being the change rather than trying to fix a broken system, why she calls strategic work "architecture with a big A," what architecture education does to the students it can't accommodate, how BFA grew from a group chat into a social enterprise, and why she hesitated before accepting an MBE with "British Empire" in the name.