Melbourne-based practice Buchan has announced three senior sector appointments—Simon Gregory as Retail Sector Lead, Hayden Djakic as Hospitality Sector Lead and Carol Leung as Interiors Lead—part of a wider reshuffle that continues the studio’s shift towards a sector-led organisational model.
Consolidating sector expertise within an integrated studio
Buchan’s new appointments signal a deliberate move to sharpen sector accountability across its retail, hospitality and interiors workstreams. Elevating principal-level designers into named sector leads creates clearer client touchpoints and internal career pathways, and it aligns resource allocation with market demand. In practice, this tends to reduce friction on complex mixed-use commissions: a retail sector lead can coordinate commercial strategy and tenant engagement while an interiors lead translates brand and operational needs into spatial reality. That separation of remit also helps a multidisciplinary firm like Buchan present a more coherent offer to developers and operators who increasingly prefer a single team capable of spanning urban design, architecture, interiors and placemaking.
What the line-up suggests about project priorities
Assigning distinct leads for retail, hospitality and interiors indicates a reading of the marketplace in which these disciplines, though overlapping, require specialist stewardship. Retail remains intensely competitive and data-driven; a dedicated retail lead suggests Buchan wants to deepen expertise in customer circulation, experiential zoning and resilience strategies for centres adapting to omnichannel retailing. Hospitality leadership, meanwhile, signals focus on operational planning, service flows and guest experience—areas that demand close collaboration with food & beverage, brand and engineering consultants. The interiors lead role underscores the premium clients now place on atmospheric design, materiality and brand expression, particularly across lifestyle hospitality and mixed-use developments where interiors form a meaningful proportion of project value.
Organisationally, these appointments dovetail with recent senior changes at the practice and reflect a broader industry trend: large firms moving from geographic or project-type silos toward sector-based matrices that better capture repeatable knowhow. That structure can accelerate learning between projects but also requires strong governance to avoid creating new internal silos; success will depend on how well sector leads are empowered to influence resourcing, design standards and cross-disciplinary briefs.
Why this matters to operators and creatives: For hospitality operators and design teams, Buchan’s reshuffle offers a practical example of how practices are reorganising to deliver sector-specific intelligence at scale. Operators seeking partners with repeatable, operationally literate design processes should look for named sector leads—these roles often translate into faster briefing, tighter cost-control and interiors that more convincingly embody brand proposition. For creatives, the move highlights career routes where deep sector competence and collaborative fluency are increasingly rewarded, and it underlines the commercial advantage of marrying spatial design with operational strategy in hospitality and retail commissions.