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
