Design

Designing beyond the brief: Michael Kilkeary and Darren Mills of Cadence & Co on creating homes around how people live 

Interview by Hamish McDougall

Darren Mills, director of design-led construction company Cadence & Co, finished a holiday home in Palm Beach for a client earlier this year and caught up with him over a drink not long after. He expected to hear about the lounge room or the kitchen. Instead, the client described his three adult sons gathering in a bar that hadn’t existed in the old house, one of them getting up mid-conversation to pour his father a drink he hadn’t asked for. “All his feedback about the project we’d delivered for them was about the experiences he got with his family,” Mills says.

Cadence & Co is a design-and-construct studio operating in Sydney and the Southern Highlands. For Mills and design principal Michael Kilkeary, almost every project—whether a kitchen renovation or a decade-long investment thesis—begins with the same question: what does the client actually want from their house? More often than not, the answer is different from what they first asked for.

Projects by Cadence & Co include ‘Melody House’ in Mittagong, a home shaped by music and mid-century modernism, and ‘Cedar House’ (topmost), which features a terrace lounging zone that frames uninterrupted views of the Australian bush beyond. (Photos courtesy of Cadence & Co)

Distilling the brief

Clients arrive with a folder of references that rarely agree with each other, gathered from travel and, increasingly, the internet. “There’s all kinds of influence that comes our way, that lands on our desk for each project,” Kilkeary says. “But it’s always been our role to distil that, and look to the essence of what the client is after”—to read past the image itself to the feeling behind it, “rather than a particular look or place.”

That approach is supported by the way the firm is structured. Cadence & Co brings architecture and interior design together with its own construction and project-management teams, and remains involved in maintenance after handover. “It’s not a diluted offering of all things,” Kilkeary says. “It’s a very elevated offering in each area, brought together.” 

Left: The ‘Northern Lights’ house by Cadence & Co takes the form of a concrete “tree-house” with its wave-like roof doubling as a rooftop driveway above the studio space beneath. Right: Michael Kilkeary and Darren Mills of Cadence & Co in the living room of ‘Clifton’, a heritage Mosman home reimagined through contemporary design. (Photos courtesy of Cadence & Co)

What clients are asking for has shifted, too. Rather than settling on a single, recognisable style, they are increasingly looking for an international hybrid. Mills describes the current brief as an antithesis to the “Australian” look he sees around him: “black taps and gold hardware”. One project underway, for example, blends the Mediterranean with the Australian bush. Cadence & Co now runs regular buying trips to Morocco, the US, and Europe because the specific, artisan pieces clients want rarely exist in the local market. The firm designs around what it finds rather than the other way round—an antique table bought in France or Italy becomes the starting point for a room, not a piece selected to fit one.

Landscape is likewise considered from the start, rather than something addressed later. Cadence & Co works closely with Myles Baldwin Design, with Kilkeary describing how the two studios have been learning from each other for the last five or so years. Their own Southern Highlands office, landscaped by Baldwin, makes the case for them: clients visiting for the first time will comment on the garden outside the window before they comment on anything the firm has built.

Captured from above, the ‘Grove House’ in Northbridge wraps the landscaped garden and pool in an arrangement that references the playful mid-century homes of Southern California. (Photo courtesy of Cadence & Co)

Designing around experience

The pandemic changed the question clients ask of their own homes. “What Covid really opened our eyes to is questioning: does this house actually give me the experiences I want while I’m here?” Kilkeary says.  Before then, decisions were often shaped by resale—whether leaving out a room, for instance, might affect the property’s value down the line. For Cadence & Co’s clients, that consideration has largely fallen away, replaced by a more personal question: “what do I actually want from my home?” rather than “what is a home supposed to contain?”

The most notable casualty has been the formal dining room, or rather the second and third ones. “It’s just the dining room now,” is how the firm sums it up—no longer split by occasion or generation, as clients want to be together, not only for the meal but for cooking it. Kilkeary describes the shift as a return to something more basic: the house understood as a series of relationships between people and space, where the arrangement of rooms can either encourage those connections or limit them. 

Left: At ‘Georgetown Stables’, a saddle room sits just beyond a cosy tack lounge, where timber walls, Western hats, and saddlery create a casual, personal atmosphere inspired by the client’s love of Western riding. Right: Just outside the saddle room, a covered timber-framed lounge invites casual gathering, layered with kilim cushions and bushland views. (Photos courtesy of Cadence & Co)

Mills has watched a single brief expand under that logic. A client asked them to renovate the kitchen in a Southern Highlands property he’d bought almost as an afterthought, mainly to give his three adult sons—then in their twenties— a reason to visit. But the firm pushed back on the brief and questioned whether a kitchen renovation would achieve what he actually wanted. What they created instead was an indoor basketball court inside an old winery building, a set of stables, and a wellness centre. During his sons’ next milestone birthday at the property, the father found himself looking through photos on their phones, seeing how they had been using the place without him knowing—friends gathering, girlfriends riding the horses, and the house coming to life when he wasn’t there. “They are going down there and using it,” Mills says. “That’s the whole point.”

Trust as the real product 

Underneath the design language is the financial argument. Cadence & Co’s clients are typically self-made, commercially minded, and can’t afford to build a folly—making the firm’s investment thinking part of the proposition. That thinking is grounded in the premise that land values will likely stay flat over the next decade, while replacement costs will not.

Mills uses a Paddington example to make the point concrete: a house worth $5 million that would cost $8 million to rebuild from scratch. “You’re going to find that the expensive part to replace is the construction, not the land,” he says. With many Sydney properties already selling below replacement cost, he sees strong potential for residential values over the next 10 years. Most of the firm’s clients now build with a minimum 10-year horizon in mind, increasingly with multigenerational living factored into the brief as families plan for adult children to move back in, or live nearby.

Across the kitchen and main living space of ‘Cedar House’, Cadence & Co brings old and new together in dialogue between its 1970s modernist bones and a new “Bush Modernism” identity. (Photos courtesy of Cadence & Co)

The clearest expression of that long-term thinking, though, is trust—and for Cadence & Co, that means honesty over salesmanship.  Mills once talked a fairly new client out of buying an acreage property near Sydney, telling him it wouldn’t deliver what he actually wanted. The client bought in the Southern Highlands instead, then called Mills, apologetic, asking him to come and look at doing up the kitchen to make up for the wasted time. Mills felt that doing only the kitchen wouldn’t achieve what the client was looking for, and suggested extending the family room and reworking a bedroom instead. The client was initially wary, wondering whether Mills was pushing him towards a larger project than he had in mind, but eventually came around. That relationship is now years deep. 

Mills tells a second story from Sydney Contemporary, where the firm hosts most years. A first-time client, reticent almost to the point of standoffishness through the whole design process, finally opened up about how personal the project had become to him only once the interiors were finished and he could see the response for himself. It is the same pattern the firm describes across every longer relationship—that the real product isn’t the finished schedule or the square metreage, but how much a client is willing to reveal about how they actually want to live. That trust tends to compound, project after project.

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In brief: Cadence & Co

Cadence & Co is a Sydney and Southern Highlands design-and-construct firm run by director Darren Mills and design principal Michael Kilkeary, delivering architecture, interiors, construction, and post-completion maintenance from one practice.

Investor insights: The investment logic Cadence & Co argues for its clients has independent backing: ABS data puts the rise in house construction output prices at 40.8 per cent between September 2020 and June 2024, and Cotality figures put NSW’s average new-house build cost at roughly $2,396 per square metre, more than 50 per cent above Western Australia’s—well below what an architect-led, bespoke build of the kind Cadence & Co delivers typically costs.

Australian freehold residential property carries none of the leasehold complications common across parts of Asia; the constraint clients are navigating instead is replacement cost outpacing land value, which is the entire premise of the firm’s 10-year argument.

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