WP Council Connections with David Roberts 8.15.24

Hi.

Yeah, so I was born in Perth in Western Australia. Many of you will know it's considered the most remote city in the world. I have two brothers in my family, and my father was in construction, so I had a background in construction. But I think one of the important things early in my life was that when I was six, my family had a house designed for us by an architect, and that house ended up being a very important part of our family. It was unusual in its design. It really responded to the West Australian climate. It was cool and didn't require any air conditioning in the 100-degree summers. It faced north to receive the winter sun and had enormous sliding doors and a courtyard in order to open up the entire house in the afternoon to receive the sea breezes that came off the Indian Ocean, which we overlooked. So this house we were very proud of, but it also gave me insight into how small decisions can affect people in a very profound way. The architect was a good friend of our family, and I sort of had a rapport with him, and that is really the root of my professional interest in design. I still have Tony Saski's architect's desk at my home now, which he designed for himself and had made for himself, so I'm very proud to have that. He also designed my dad's desk as well, which my brother has, so he's very much still part of our family in that way.

Well, yeah. I first came to the States in '86. I had worked for an American practice in Australia who had been selected to design Australia's new Parliament House. That was a massive project, a billion-dollar project, 30 or 40 years ago almost. Because I'd worked for them, part of my degree required a year of work experience after three years before finishing your degree, so I decided to come to the States because of my experience with that architecture practice. In '86, I worked in New York City and had just the most amazing experience. It was fabulous. I was living in Manhattan and worked for a small practice. I always say the two architects I worked for I called the Odd Couple of architecture because they were always arguing with each other, opposites, and on a daily basis would throw up the sash of the window and offer the sill to the other partner so they could push the other one out the window. But it was a tremendous year. They were very supportive of my endeavors and made a big impression on me. In Australia, we kind of followed a more English, more traditional approach to architecture. What I saw in New York was that everything was designed to get things done and make decisions, not put it off to the next week. Even as a student, I was given pretty important decisions to make, and I really liked that. In that year, I met my first wife, and we returned and ended up living in Australia for a number of years together in Melbourne. We have two sons who were born in Australia, and then we ended up moving back here 29 years ago when they were two and five. That was the reason why I ended up in the States, but also why I ended up in the Hudson Valley. My first wife grew up in the Hudson Valley, and we wanted to be close to New York City, so we moved to New Paltz. We bought a house on Prospect Street, so that was my introduction to New Paltz almost 30 years ago. We arrived on July 4th, 1995.

Yeah.

Well, growing up, we would have... there's also spiders, of course. The common one for us was the redback spider, and we'd see them in the garden. The thing was, you just left them alone. Same with the snakes. So Australians tend to have a pretty lackadaisical response to poisonous wildlife. I'll also say that when I was a kid and we'd go swimming at the beach, quite often someone would yell out, 'Oh, there's a shark in the water,' so everyone would get out. Ten minutes later, everyone would start to get back in the water again because, you know, it's just a shark after all.

Yes, yeah. Well, there's also... I don't have a lot of experience with the box jellyfish, but there's also what we just call bluebottles. They have a long stinger that's blue and they wrap around your legs. You see them from time to time. We see a few of those.

Yeah. I did have a pet kangaroo when I was a child.

Okay, so my brother went with a friend to his friend's farm, and as you do, they went out kangaroo shooting at night and shot the mother, then found that it had a little joey. So they brought the joey home. It was probably only weeks old, and we fed it with an eyedropper, fed it goat milk. So we had the kangaroo for about six months. What we did was get a sweater and sew the bottom of the sweater, and it would jump into the neck of the sweater, and then you could tie the sweater to the back of a chair or even around your waist if you wanted to, and it viewed that as its home. After six months, we had to get rid of the kangaroo because it could hop pretty fast at that point, and being in the suburbs, it wasn't ideal. It has a happy ending to the story, though. 18 years later, we gave it away to a refuge. Katie the kangaroo. 18 years later, the woman that ran the refuge wrote her autobiography, and there on the cover of her book was Katie the kangaroo. So Katie lived a long, happy life in the kangaroo refuge.

No, no, I had left in '95.

Yeah, I have a daughter as well. I've been married three times. Third's a charm. I have three children: Oliver, Harrison, and Sofia. My eldest son is an artist. He went to the Art Institute of Chicago, graduated from there, and he's now doing his Masters in Melbourne in Australia. Actually, he's closing out a show right at the moment. My middle son is in sales. He works for a Swiss company that manufactures espresso machines. He heads sales in the northeast of the states. My daughter is at Barnard, and she's going into her third year at Barnard in Manhattan.

Yeah, so running is really a passion for me. As a kid, I competed in cross country at a state and national level in Australia, and track and field, so I've been paying a lot of attention to the Olympics. The 1500 and 5000 were my races. When I was 17, I read a book. Some of you will be familiar with James Fixx. He wrote The Complete Book of Running in the 70s, and I read that when I was 16. He died, but he wrote a chapter on the Boston Marathon, and I thought, 'Wow, that seems like just such an extraordinary thing.' Back in those days, the people that inspired me were Bill Rogers, who won Boston a number of times, and also a woman called Kathrine Switzer. So at 16, I decided I was going to run a marathon, and six months later, I ran my first marathon. My dad, who had been a lifelong runner, saw me training for it and said, 'Oh, well, I'll have a shot at that too,' and he ran his first marathon at the same race that I did. He went on to run several more and ran his last when he was 80. I've run a few now. I ran Berlin in '22 and Chicago. I've run Boston a couple of times and New York. I'll run Boston again in the spring. The great thing about running is that it really got me through COVID. I have this great group of people, and we hang out and chat and go through all the things that are going on in our lives, and we just happen to run for 12, 14, 15, or 20 miles while having a conversation. During COVID, those Sunday morning long runs were what I really looked forward to because that was the time when I was spending time with other people. I'll also add that I mentioned Kathrine Switzer. She was the first woman to run in Boston. She entered under her name K. Switzer, just put a letter in there, and of course, it was before women were allowed to run marathons. When the race director saw that a woman was in his race, he famously tried to physically push her out of the race. There's a very famous photo of that, of him trying to push her out, and her boyfriend at the time trying to protect her. The lovely piece about this is that Kathrine Switzer is a local runner. She and her husband live in New Paltz, so I've come to get to know her. She's at a lot of local races. This is someone that inspired me through her story, and yet now she's someone that is part of the community here, which is really lovely.

Oh yeah, Rock the Ridge. Yeah, I've done that a couple of times. It's an 80K or 50-mile race. It's kind of a 'smell the roses' thing. You just get out there and enjoy being outside. You just happen to be running at the same time.

Well, I do enjoy baking and cooking a lot. I love baking bread, not so much in the warm months, but throughout six months of the year, I bake bread every week. I also love making pies and tarts and cakes and all that good stuff. The crew downstairs have been the beneficiary of some of my efforts.

Oh, that's great.

Orange. Yeah, orange. It's active, it's optimistic. Vitamin C.

Gandré? Oh, oh, so I listen to more hip hop and R&B and rap than probably people might expect, but I have a pretty wide range of music that I enjoy. I was saying to you that I'm just as likely... I also love those old swing tunes, so Frank Sinatra, 'Come Fly with Me,' 'Fly Me to the Moon' I think is one of the greatest songs ever written. So pretty broad.

Yeah, it's tough, isn't it? But I do have a great love for Lost in Translation. I think that's a really terrific movie, a good message, and funny. What was the other one? Oh, the guilty pleasure is The Devil Wears Prada, just because it's so well written and there are so many great lines in that, and Meryl Streep is great. My daughter and my wife and I have probably watched it countless times because it's an easy family film.

Well, it's hard. Growing up, I was a fan of the Demons, who are an Australian football team. If you've never seen Australian Rules, it's like something you've never watched before. It's now the West Coast Eagles, but you become a supporter of sports teams for strange reasons. I have to support the Yankees because my sons were Yankee fans. The thing about baseball is that I didn't grow up with it, but I developed a real enjoyment for the game watching my sons play. Especially in spring, getting out there and seeing them play. My older son was a catcher, a pretty scrappy catcher. So yeah, I developed a knowledge and a love for the game through my sons.

Yeah, I mean, The Vivisector by Patrick White. He's an Australian author that won the Nobel Prize in the 70s, I think '73, for literature. It's a very Australian book, and it's quite existential. It's reading matter, and it's really like the angst or the psyche of the artist, I would say. But tough to describe. That's a book that I've read many times, and I really love it. I think the other one I mentioned was James Joyce's 'The Dead.' It's a short story. 'The Dead' is just a wonderful, wonderful story, and it's a great movie too. What else did I have in there? You had James McBride. Oh yes, The Color of Water. That's a recent book I finished just in the last month. What an extraordinary book that is. That's the sort of book where this is why I read, because it has such a profound story. If you don't know it, his mother was Jewish but sort of renounced her Jewishness, and she raised 12 children. All her children were African-American, so she raised... I guess Jewish African-American. But she didn't allow that she was Jewish. She just said, 'I just happen to look different to you.' It's a great story of hers and his as a mother and son, written by James McBride.

Yeah, I mean, I think the things that are important to me in design, as you've heard, is that there are small decisions that affect people every day, and I think that's what good design is about. To me, it's about creating environments that enhance your daily life. Some of those things are big decisions, and some of them are smaller things. I think what I see the potential for this project is really adding to everyone's amenity and enjoyment and providing facilities that aid that on a daily basis. If you look at the different components, whether it's dining or wellness and health and fitness, those things are in place to enjoy life. In terms of the process, it's pretty fascinating too. This morning, I was describing the issue about how do we add onto the back of the dining room, and we're all thinking, 'Well, we could make a big earth ramp, or we can crane over the building.' These are the discussions where the collaboration becomes really important. I met with a friend on Tuesday evening who's also an architect, and we were talking about the things we enjoy, and we both agreed it was the collaboration with other people, not just architects but with clients and with other professionals, sitting around and figuring out how things are going to be done, and also with the subcontractors because you learn so much. Earlier in my career, I was designing and running a project at the same time, a house for a very well-known celebrity. I was on site every day, and up until that point in my career, I had thought, 'I'm the architect, I'm the leader, I'm meant to know everything.' It was such a relief to be on site with the carpenter or the plumber and say, 'Well, I don't know how we're going to figure this out,' and really collaborate with people and end up with a better solution. That was a great lesson, something I hope I've carried through for the rest of my career. It's really about listening to people and figuring it out together.

Yeah, and that's true. I think that was one of the things before I even took on this role was that I heard Michelle saying, 'We're going to do everything right. We're not here to cut corners, and we're going to plan everything in advance.' That was very reassuring to me because it told me that Michelle has engaged consultants who have been here before. This is before I came on, like the developer Greystone, and gotten very good financial advice but also development advice. That has been the sort of modus operandi right from the start: to do this properly and not just jump in. So many clients think, 'Oh, we're going to do this,' and the next day they want to start building something. They're very anxious to start. I think we all have sufficient experience to know the way to do this is to plan first, and then the actual construction process will go as smoothly as we can possibly make it happen.

So it was through a friend. In my search, I hadn't seen it, but I did also know Mark Isen Handler here, and he spoke about the culture of working at Woodland Pond. So I knew how supportive this culture was, both from the residents and also the staff, and that was very interesting to me.

Yes, that's exactly right. Mark and I, we spend those Sunday mornings together.

Yep, yes.

Yes, yeah. No, she lives between here and the Ridge. Her husband, Roger Robinson, is a very accomplished runner as well and a writer, very well-known writer about running. They were at the Olympics too, actually. Kathrine started the women's marathon in these Olympics in Paris.