About Us PlaceMate Architects Brisbane

Our Story

Masters of Architecture

PlaceMate Architects are Brisbane’s premium residential and renovation specialist architects with over three decades of expertise, dedicated to collaborating with owners to bring their own vision of home to reality.

Like many owners, this might be your first and only building project and a major personal investment for the next 10-20 years. You know it will be complex and challenging but worth it. Now you’re ready. So you must get it right, and you can’t do it on your own.

We take pride in creating beautiful, considered, grounded designs, and navigating you through the complex process of design, documentation, and approvals, through a smooth collaborative build for a fair price, until you are living your way, in your own home, as you imagined.

The Beginning

Founded in 1999 by architect Jan Hogarth, PlaceMate Architects provided an avenue for Jan to imagine beautiful, practical homes. From an early age, Jan fell in love with blueprints and building, desiring only to become an architect. Since then her team has grown with more than 40 individual projects at any time, from the first phone call to construction.

We recognise and celebrate your experience of the complex realities of home life. For over 30 years, Jan ran a household for 3 daughters, aging parents, pets and grandchildren. And the team have also experienced disabilities and different cultures. Having established relationships with consultants and builders, we tap into their practical experience to minimise delays, and avoid wasting your time and money.

Building a Legacy

We have designed over 500 privately owned Brisbane homes, building over 200 various individual alterations and additions from an 1830’s cottage to 1980’s brown brick, but mostly Queenslanders of all sizes. We also design new homes to personalised specifications.

Our team works tirelessly to understand your lifestyle needs, not just for today, more so, building for your future. We bring a conservative flexible design ethos to support our collaborating owners. We believe that when a home must be regenerated to suit your family’s needs, the place should become a bigger, better version of itself and enhance what is already beautiful about it.

Jan Hogarth

Director/ Principal Architect

Because Jan specialises in residential architecture, she has honed her expertise over time. She has designed over 1,000 domestic building projects of all sizes and budgets from Moreton Bay to Boggabilla, Mooloolaba to Byron Bay, to all over the western suburbs of Brisbane.

Jan graduated from the University of Queensland in 1987 with a double degree Bachelor of Architecture/Design Studies and has dedicated her life to designing beautiful home renovations, extensions, and rebuilds.

She has created hundreds of new homes and renovations on properties dating from 1860 to 2010. From small lots in the city to acreage properties with beautiful hillside views, Jan has done it all!

She also personally designed and developed three multi-unit complexes.

Jan has lived in St. Lucia for most of her life and is the mother of three adult daughters, and Gran Jan of two.

 

“My life purpose is designing beautiful places for lovely people. One day we’ll be walking around in a dingy house, and sometime later, in the same place, we’ll be standing in an open airy kitchen, looking out over the living room and the deck to the garden and the view. It’s literally walking around in a dream come true.”