S2 Architects

THE RIGHT TEAM FOR YOUR NEXT ADVENTURE

Founding partners Amy and Dan joined forces as young architects to challenge traditional approaches and focus on the unique needs of tourist and visitor destinations. Years later, they are Studio S2’s husband-and-wife directors, leading a team of extraordinary people.

Destinations throughout Australia can access all of the expertise that comes from single-minded dedication to the tourism sector and from our team’s personal experience of worldwide destinations. Studio S2 lives and breathes tourism, and we can help you shape your own extraordinary.

THINK BIGGER.

Beyond every day, deep down, you know there’s more. You can make your business exceptional and think bigger. That means asking two key questions: “Is it the best it can be? The best for us?”. We’ve built an entire business around one of the most challenging industries, where you live and die by an instant judgement. Our unique profiling tool allows us to unearth the ‘personality’ of your spaces, giving insights into how to create something that is unique to you.

IMPROVE PROFITABILITY

Our knowledge of retail models, merchandising and operational efficiencies is evident in the increased commercial success of our clients. You need spaces that sell both experiences and products, and Studio S2 can help you to avoid ‘might have been’ visits that end before they start because of simple problems like signage and parking. We know how to make the most of the visitors who spend time with you, so they feel welcome from the start.

MAKE IT PERSONAL

Clients keep asking us for help long after a project has been completed – we become an extended members of your team, advising on any of the visual aspects of your space. We don’t do ‘standard’: the style you need dictates our style.

We love to travel too – often staying at clients’ premises and buying your products so we see things as a tourist would. It means we don’t ‘accidentally’ land on the answer, but truly understand what people are feeling and what others are offering.

USE THE SPECIALISTS

Tourism is all we do – we know it all the way from strategy to cushions and everything in between. Our team travels extensively and we prioritise being tourists whenever we can. Clients speak of our depth of authority in this industry, saying: “You’d be crazy to use anyone else.”

Studio S2 can make visitors’ first encounter with you amazing. Some of the recent regions we’ve worked in include Adelaide, Barossa Valley, Clare Valley, McLaren Vale, Adelaide Hills, Kangaroo Island, Coonawarra, Riverland, Langhorne Creek, Flinders Ranges, Yorke Peninsula, Eyre Peninsula, SE Queensland, Perth Hills and Rutherglen. Our work also takes us interstate and we have worked in several regional areas in Victoria and New South Wales.

CREATE A SENSE OF ‘PLACE’

We’ll help you to express your extraordinary and how to tell your story to visitors. You’ll see from our gallery of projects that we create a sense of ‘place’ – somewhere defined not by appearance alone, but also by how visitors feel, thanks to the quality of their interactions with the space they find themselves in. Our goal is to delight travellers, creating memories that inspire future visits.

STEP 01: START WITH A COFFEE
For most tourism businesses, working on your buildings and grounds is a big deal. There is a lot of money and time at stake and can be difficult to know where to start. So let’s just start with a coffee.

STEP 02: PRE-DESIGN CONFIDENCE PACKAGE
What do tourists need? What will add value? What are the priorities? How do you tell a brand story to tourists, use the brand character to shape your buildings and make them work for you? Are you confident in your choices and decisions? Can you make it an unmissable tourism experience? Work out whether your idea is feasible, the priorities and characteristics, whether the council will allow you to do what you want to do and get an idea of costs and timeframes before you make a big commitment. This service is a stand-alone, fixed-price & no-obligation package.

WINE TOURISM OPPORTUNITIES PACKAGE
Studio S2 Architects have now partnered with leading wine business advisors Evans + Ayers to extend our pre-design package to explore how you will make your project profitable, how it fits into an overall business strategy, what the opportunities and risks are within the current market and how you would structure and fund any works.

STEP 03: THE BIG PICTURE
Capture the ideas and vision, the essence of your place, brand and story as well as the functionality and needs of tourists in a big-picture design strategy. The concept should excite investors and stakeholders and get them invested in it going ahead. Creating a simple representation of a concept idea – a big picture – as a fixed price early design stage service helps you to balance the outlay with surety of commitment and confidence moving forward. This service is a fixed price & no-obligation package.

We are specialist Architects and Interior Designers in the tourism industry – we know tourism, and how your buildings can work to attract visitors, increase sales and drive profit, and make your place unmissable. We help you navigate the design and construction process, and we draw on our team’s expertise as you require them to supply the skills you need for your journey.

Through our process, you will gain clarity about how to make good decisions about your spaces and spend money wisely so that decisions are consistently on brand and commercially valuable. As the experts on your own brand, we seek to empower you to delve deep to discover your unique character and shape it in 3 dimensions. We challenge you to rethink the rules and industry standards and to have the courage to create truly authentic, character-filled spaces that tell stories to the people inside.

VISITOR EXPERIENCE STRATEGY
The path to great experiences and great places can be complicated – and building something is a big deal. That’s why our process starts with setting a groundwork strategy that shapes the decisions to come. Your brand character is the focus, and mapping out the essential elements that tell your story is the outcome.

• Pre-Design Confidence package – examining the ‘on paper’ feasibility of the project
• Brand Strategy for your Building and Site
• Story Telling Progression
• Visitor Experience Journey
• Big Picture Strategy for building form and character
• Whole Site Master Plans

DESIGN
You’ve set some great strategic groundwork to make decisions, now it’s time to shape that Strategy into a tangible building project. Armed with the Visitor Experience Strategy, our team collaborate with our in-house architecture and interiors plus any additional expertise that need to be drawn from external consultants to map out a more detailed design that captures your needs. Because we think it is of utmost importance that you understand what is being proposed, we also prototype the design as a digital walk thought model as a standard, with no added cost service.

• Site Planning
• Architecture
• Interior Design
• Retail and Food Space Design
• Eco Design
• Heritage
• Planning consent assistance (council approval)
• Funding application assistance

IMPLEMENTATION
It’s easy to get caught up at this point, thinking that it’s full steam ahead from here, but there’s still a way to go. Communication of the design and between the various stakeholders is essential to achieving a professional and complete project. The design will disappear with our team for several weeks while we finesse the ideas into a buildable project and interpret them into a set of drawings that can be read (and priced) by a builder and approved for construction by the council. We are with you all the way to the end and can manage the process to help ensure the time, cost and quality expectations are kept in check.

• Project Management
• Construction Drawings
• Tender & contracts assistance
• Construction Administration
• Post Construction Services
• Furniture (FF&E) Procurement

We are experts in visitor experience design, with proven experience in tourism projects across Australia.

CELLAR DOOR AND TASTING ROOMS
We will show you how your buildings can work to appeal to visitors, optimise productivity, tell your story and promote long-term loyalty. We challenge our clients to rethink the traditional design of cellar doors, providores and tasting spaces, and to create truly authentic character-filled spaces that work for you.

How you lead your visitors through your space is critical to creating an environment that will attract more visitors, get them browsing more products, increase sales and draw customers back to your business in the future. Through the effective design of your winery or distillery, visitors will understand, remember and purchase from you. Staff will work better to engage visitors, impart information and sell your products.

HOTEL AND ACCOMMODATION
Whether you are already running successful accommodation or thinking of creating a new place, we can help you turn your guest house, retreat, resort, hotel, motel, hostel, b&b or inn into a space that works more effectively. Telling a great story through buildings will make your guests buy more – by understanding, remembering and recommending, guests will make longer bookings, more often.

Today’s accommodation properties must become a hybrid between the comfort of home and the atmosphere of the local culture and place – merging efficiency of operation, the sanctuary of home and authenticity in experience. We’ll show you how.

ATTRACTION AND VISITOR CENTRES
We can help you create a visitor or welcome centre where the local character and stories are so tangible that visitors become curious and motivated, and where people understand the value of your place and how special it is so that spending time and money in the region is the obvious choice.

We do this by focussing on three things:

1. Communicating the uniqueness of the place and its stories in built form
2. Harnessing what attracts visitors – their expectations and perceptions – and what makes them feel welcome, engaged and connected
3. Subtle but purposeful commercialisation to support growth and profits.