Meridian is a two-person architecture practice above a print shop on Langridge Street in Collingwood.
We take four commissions at a time. Both directors work on every project from the first site visit to practical completion. The practice is small because the attention has to be total. We don't subcontract design and we don't take work we can't visit fortnightly.
Most of our buildings are within twenty kilometres of this desk. We work across residential, commercial, and public projects. The common thread is restraint — fewer materials, not more. Let the site speak before drawing anything. Every decision earns its place or gets cut.
Sarah Chen
BArch (Hons) Melbourne, MArch Yale. Registered in Victoria and New South Wales. Sarah worked at John Wardle Architects for six years on residential projects from heritage renovations to new coastal builds before co-founding Meridian. She leads residential commissions and teaches design studio at RMIT. Her work focuses on how a building performs across a full year of seasons — not how it photographs on the right afternoon.
James Whitfield
BEnvDes, MArch RMIT. Registered in Victoria. James spent five years at Kerstin Thompson Architects on libraries, community centres, and social housing. He leads commercial and public commissions and manages all construction-phase administration at Meridian. His interest is in adaptive reuse and material honesty — finding what a building already knows before imposing anything new. He has not missed a fortnightly site visit in seven years.
- Residential projects over 200 sqm
- Commercial fitout and tenancy
- Adaptive reuse of existing buildings
- Open design competitions
- Heritage-adjacent new builds
- Multi-residential developer volume
- Interior decoration without structure
- Projects outside greater Melbourne
- More than four commissions at once
- Anything we can't oversee personally