Ian Moore Interview

Thanks for your time, Ian. Can you give us a bit of background about your career and your practice?  

Yes, so I started in New Zealand, where I grew up. My father was a builder so I grew up on a building site. I always wanted to be an architect and used to work with my mother to design the interiors of our houses - we lived in 34 houses before I left home at the age of 17. Not all of those were built by my father, but he built a lot of houses for us, and she did a lot of interiors. So it was sort of in my blood. But my father didn’t like architects much and he wanted me to be an engineer, so I had to go and study civil and structural engineering, which in retrospect was actually a very good thing to do.  

After working for a few years at an engineering consultancy, I wanted to go and see the world. So I bought a ticket to go to London, came to Sydney for six months on the way to earn a bit of extra money, and did a little bit of work here in some engineering offices. I went to London to work for one of the biggest engineering firms in the world, working with Norman Foster on the Hong Kong Shanghai bank headquarters in Hong Kong. So I got to work on one of the most important buildings of the 20th century, and in doing that, I knew that I had to get back to architecture.  

So I enrolled in architecture in London. I got accepted, but then my visa expired. So I came back to Sydney, completed my degree and then established my own practice in 1990.  

Where do you focus your practice?

I work primarily on residential projects, small and large - so both single residential and multi residential - primarily working in and around Sydney. At the moment, it’s primarily single residential, which is fine. I like working on apartment developments, but I don’t necessarily like the process of working with developers, project managers, development managers and so on. When you’re working on a house with a client, you’re dealing directly with the end user, and I think that makes a big difference, you know exactly what they want.  

How did you first come across Stormtech products?

In 1994 or 95 I was designing a house in Redfern. We had a 7.2 metre wide aircraft hangar basically, this big box that we were building, and it was six metres high. And the client, who was a photographer, wanted to use it not only as his house, but also as a daylight photographic studio - and didn’t want any shadows cast on the wall that he was going to use to shoot against. So he wanted all the doors and windows at the back of the house to basically disappear.  

I designed six metre high doors, six panels that were 1200mm wide to get to 7.2 metres. People thought the doors would be too heavy, would get jammed, and wouldn’t work - they worked, of course.  

But the key to that whole system was the drainage. I’d seen a system of drainage where there was a 25mm wide channel that went down to the ground and had a 90mm diameter PVC pipe underneath. And it was a Stormtech drain that separated the lawn from paved areas. Everything was at the same level, there was no step down or anything. And that was the whole key to it - it was just seamless. So I thought if I use a Stormtech drain, and take off the plastic bit with the perforations in it and put in an aluminium section to make it more durable, not only will it be the drain, but we will be able to put the two guide pins of the door into that slot so that they actually move along the slot. I asked Stormtech if it was possible, and they said, ‘anything’s possible’.  

And you still work closely to this day?

I specify Stormtech drains in every single project - I don’t know of a project since that time where I haven’t used them to be honest. I know there are a lot of competitor drains that copy what Stormtech developed now, but we always specify the real thing. Dealing with developers and builders on those big apartment developments - I’m not always sure that what we specify is what we get because they’re trying to look for a cheaper alternative. But for all of our houses, I can absolutely guaranteethat they’re all Stormtech.