Architect Jared Webb on building a wardrobe that works

The Brisbane-based architect has built a sense of style that is fit-for-purpose

By Benjamen Judd

Published: Jul 23, 2026

Jared Webb, style — Image: Jessie Prince

ARCHITECTS are all about structure and form, function and space. No surprises that they can often be some of the best-dressed people you will ever meet. Cue Jared Webb, founder of architectural firm J.AR Offices in Brisbane and, not to stereotype, a man of great style as well.

“[I keep things] casual and relatively understated,” Webb tells Esquire. No fuss. Instead, Webb explains, he is drawn to shape and fabric over superfluous logos.

“With a hint of precision. Much like our buildings,” he jokes. But like all jokes, there’s a kernel of truth in there, too.

Webb established J.AR Office back in 2022 after a decade of working across interior, architectural and precinct-scaled projects. He’s now spent the last three years accumulating a healthy volume of recognition for a practice that is still in its early chapter.

His work tends to begin with existing conditions rather than imposing a signature. At Oxlade, for example, a 1969 apartment was stripped back to recover its modernist logic and its relationship to climate. At The Warehouses in Currumbin, five industrial sheds were reorganised around an internal street, turning leftover commercial fabric into something closer to a civic precinct.

Hospitality projects – Gerard’s, Central – extend this thinking indoors, using permanence, procession and social choreography to give restaurants architectural weight. The practice is most convincing, and most itself, when it treats interiors not as decoration but as urban instruments: places that alter how people gather, linger and move.

The recognition has followed accordingly. The Warehouses took out the National Commercial Architecture Award at the 2024 National Architecture Awards alongside multiple AIA Queensland accolades. In 2025, Central swept the Interior Design Excellence Awards, winning both Overall Project of the Year and Best Hospitality Design, while J.AR Office itself took the Emerging Designer prize. Norte won Best Restaurant Design at the Eat Drink Design Awards the same year.

The connection between Webb’s built work and his personal wardrobe is concise. Webb describes his typical day as one that shifts between a construction site, client presentation, studio and dinner. A logistical problem he solves with a loosely calibrated uniform: neutral and navy tones, tropical wools and cottons (a concession to the Queensland heat), a loafer swapped in when the day calls for it.

“Swap out a sneaker for a loafer and a coffee for a martini,” he says, which is essentially a complete brief. His shopping habits run high-low – JW Anderson, Bottega Veneta and Bode sit alongside core basics from Uniqlo and COS. For tailoring, he has been going to P Johnson for over a decade, with Brisbane-based Thomas Knight now handling the made-to-measure side of things.

But Webb’s wardrobe has an origin story. He credits the architect Adrian Spence – described, with some deference, as the lord of Brisbane fashion – with providing the foundation via hand-me-downs. What built on top of that was travel and the world of discovery that this brought to Webb. And what travel has recently meant, professionally, is Milan.

Webb recently attended the annual Salone del Mobile, and packing for it was, by his account, an exercise in miscalculation: he arrived prepared for 15 degrees and found 25. Each day became its own exercise in improvisation, with comfortable trousers and low sneakers doing the heavy lifting, and cocktail parties at night providing an occasion to recalibrate upward.

His read on Milan as a dress code is generous: “elevated casual and colour”.

The impulse purchase that made it home was a pair of Prada sneakers – low profile, black gum base, beige nylon upper, elasticated laces – acquired for the purpose of trekking between exhibitions. The best kind of purchase, he says, is always the unplanned one.

For Webb, eyewear functions as the equivalent of jewellery as he has worn optical since he was eight, and his wardrobe for the week included pieces from Brunello Cucinelli, Grand Le Mar and JW Anderson, with a Bottega Veneta Diago Hobo in old wood absorbing whatever Milan threw at it.

The connection between architecture and dress, for Webb, is less metaphorical than structural. Fashion show set design, he says, influences the practice’s work – experience-driven, palette-led. He gravitates to the same colour register in both disciplines. “Innately, I start dressing in the same palette,” he says. “Blending in with the furniture.”

This runs through both the buildings and the man wearing the Prada sneakers. Brisbane, he says, could use more of Milan’s energy. Given what his practice has been quietly doing to the city’s fabric, he might just be the one to bring it.