Simone Bliss Creative Director
Simone Bliss is an Australian landscape architect and the founder and Creative Director of SBLA Studio, an award-winning landscape architecture and urban design practice with offices in Melbourne and Launceston.
Bliss established SBLA Studio in 2016 with a focus on creating socially responsive, environmentally sensitive landscapes that connect people with place. Her work spans a wide range of scales, from masterplanning and urban design to detailed public spaces and custom play environments. She is known for combining ecological thinking, artistic expression and technical expertise to transform conceptual ideas into functional and engaging environments.
Bliss is an active contributor to the design profession and has served on the City of Melbourne Design Review Panel and other advisory bodies. Her work emphasises connection to landscape and respect for Country, with a strong commitment to collaborative and inclusive design practices.
She is widely recognised for her creativity, innovation and advocacy for socially and environmentally responsible landscape architecture.
Bede Brennan Senior Landscape Architect
Bede is a Landscape Architect interested in how people perceive and engage with the nonhuman world. This curiosity underpins his design ethos of collaborating with creatures, ecologies and places.
His project experience spans roles at Pollen Studio, as an independent consultant, and as a university educator. For over six years, Bede has taught across both undergraduate and postgraduate programs in design and geography at the University of Melbourne.
Bede also likes to write. His writing has appeared in The Planthunter, Kerb Journal, LA+ Magazine, and Smith Journal, among others. He shares his ideas through public speaking, with presentations at the MPavilion (2021), the International Festival of Landscape Architecture (2019). His 2021 collaboration with architect Vishnu Hazel was exhibited in the Salon des Refusés as part of the LA+ Creature international design competition.
At home, Bede tends to a front yard full of unusual vegetables and a flock of chickens.
Colin Chen Senior Landscape Architect
Colin is an experienced landscape architect, photographer, and graphic designer. He has a particular understanding of the constant dynamic nature of Landscape Architecture, exploring and revealing this through his design approach and methodologies.
He perceives landscape architecture as the agency to address ecological and social issues; seeking innovative ways to bring creativity and heterogeneity into the designed civic / public spaces.
Colin’s previous experience in digital media is reflected in his work. He is highly skilled in graphic representation and visualisations. As well as practicing at SBLA, Colin tutors Landscape Studios, Constructed Ecologies and Site Tectonics at the University of Melbourne.
Matt Wakelin Landscape Architect
Matt was drawn to the profession through his passion for plants and the overlap of gardening and art. This led to his keen interest in landscape architecture and urbanism due to its positive agency in creating places, spaces, and systems that tell our stories and offer meaningful ways to connect to our world.
He is also drawn to the profession’s innovative nature - its ability to solve problems through design to takle some of our world’s most pressing issues. He reckons it’s the best profession in the world.
With skills in planting, ecological design, community engagement, and hand-drawing, Matt has played key roles in designing schools, neighbourhood centres, inner-city public spaces, streetscapes, expansive inter-suburban parks, playgrounds, ecologically informed infrastructural systems, and masterplanned communities.
Phoebe Baker Studio Producer
Phoebe Baker is a composer and studio curator at SBLA Studio.
Phoebe is passionate about facilitating spaces and work places that nurture people’s well-being and sense of play. Her extensive experience in the music industry as a performer, teacher, and speaker has equipped Phoebe with a natural ability to collaborate and communicate well with teams. At SBLA, Phoebe facilitates and organises the everyday workings of a group of lovely landscape architects.
When not at SBLA, Phoebe is a performer, volunteer at community radio, and marriage celebrant..
Georgia Aldous Senior Landscape Architect
Georgia believes in promoting positive social change through physical space. To her, landscapes hold richly layered histories and she gets enjoyment from collaborating across communities, disciplines and cultures to generate meaningful and site-sensitive outcomes.
To date, her experience spans across playspaces, residential, temporary installations, strategic planning, waterways and master planning. Growing up in regional Victoria, she is passionate about the responsible development of rural and regional areas, and how this may begin to address some of the economic, social and ecological problems associated with climate change. Moving to an inner city home, she is nurturing an evergrowing productive garden. Through her work on the Coastal Resiliency Strategy for East Boston in the United States, Georgia has experienced how landscape architecture can influence positive changes in the built environment at a larger and more enduring scale. She puts this into practice with an approach to creating spaces that builds on context, looking both beyond and into site.
Esther Honybun Landscape Architect
Esther’s interests stem from the relationships between people and place. She is curious about the complexities of the landscapes we form part of and is fundamentally interested in how our experience of landscape contributes to the way we understand, relate to and ultimately look after the land we live on.
Esther prioritizes strong relationships and rejoices in working together with diverse knowledge-holders and professionals. She believes that beautiful and ecologically rich public space starts with strong, trusting relationships between project team members, the local community and key stakeholders.
