I’ve been a residential architectural designer for over 20 years and in that time I’ve designed and renovated hundreds of domestic homes. When I’m asked, what qualifications I have, I say, ‘that I been to the university of life with a degree in continual learning’. The one thing about this career is that you never stop learning. I knew early on that the vast majority of the houses design in NZ were of poor quality. And I was going to make sure that every one of the designs, I was involved with, was not going to be one of those, ‘code built houses’. In some way, each one had to be better than code. To the point now, I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head what minimum standard building codes are. So, over the years I’ve done Building Biology courses, introductory course on Passive Haus (Passive House), Living Building Challenge, professional development with ADNZ, read research papers, professional books and just talked with like minded professionals.