Episode Details

Send us your feedback, thoughts or comments!

Brooke Aitken is one of Sydney's most quietly powerful voices in residential design — a Registered Architect AND Interior Designer who has spent 21 years building Brooke Aitken Design into one of the few practices in the country with the rare ability to both build a home and furnish it. But somewhere in the middle of that journey, on a panel in front of an audience, she said something that stopped the room cold: “I was happy. But I was broke.”

This is the conversation every creative who has ever wondered if their craft will ever pay off needs to hear — an unflinchingly honest reckoning with the gap between award-winning work and a sustainable business, and what it actually takes to close it.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why Brooke walked away from a place in medical school to pursue architecture — and the moment she “cut my hair off, dyed it white blonde” and went all in
• Inside the legendary DCM years: being project architect on the interiors of the Melbourne Museum at the very start of her career
• Founding Brooke Aitken Design in 2004 with no business training, no marketing, and clients already waiting at the door
• “I was happy but broke” — what rock bottom actually looked like ten years in, while going through IVF, undiagnosed endometriosis, building her own home, and paying her staff before herself
• The Business of Design podcast moment that changed everything — and why Brooke now sits in a peer mastermind comparing real figures every six months
• Daniel Priestley’s “11 touchpoints” rule, and how Brooke rebuilt her entire marketing engine around it after a decade of hiding her work behind bad photography
• “Soft Modernism,” slow architecture, and why she’ll usually fight to save a 70s building rather than knock it down
• Inside the studio: a sister, a “design alumni” WhatsApp group, design charrettes, and why “no one has just one problem”
• “Systems will set you free” — the Asana templates and operating system every creative business owner should steal
• ChatGPT, Midjourney and how an architect known for craft is quietly experimenting with AI
• What she would tell her younger self — and why she still insists success “hasn’t happened yet”

Why this conversation matters

In a design industry that polishes every portfolio and hides every struggle, Brooke Aitken does something rare: she tells the truth. For any architect, designer or creative business owner who has ever wondered why beautiful work isn’t translating into a beautiful life, this is the conversation that names the gap — and shows what’s possible on the other side.

About Brooke

Brooke Aitken is the founder and Principal of Brooke Aitken Design, a Sydney-based studio she has led for over 20 years from her base in Ultimo. A registered architect and interior designer — one of the few in the country who delivers both — she is known for an aesthetic she calls “Soft Modernism”: contemporary, considered, deeply liveable spaces shaped by the brief, the building and the way people actually live. Her work spans heritage homes in Sydney’s east, sustainable rejuvenations of mid-century houses, and award-winning international projects in San Francisco and Palo Alto. She is also the founder of Rill + Stone, a home

To get in touch with Build Beautiful or to follow us head to our socials: 

 on Instagram

on Facebook

on LinkedIn

If you'd like to be on the podcast, or want to collaborate with Build Beautiful feel free to contact us on buildbeautifulpodcast@gmail.com.