When Samuel Tsang graduated from the UTS Bachelor of Architecture in 2005, he had all the skills he needed for a thriving career. What he didn’t have – and what he’d struggled with for a long time – was the drive to achieve.
“I wasn’t very focused at uni. I was more interested in playing basketball and DJing than studying,” he says.
UTS had the structure and the foundation for anyone to achieve greatness, but it wasn’t until I left that I realised I’d missed a lot of things I could have taken with me.
In fact, nobody is more surprised than Samuel that he’s since gone on to have a hugely successful career as an architect, interior designer and playground design specialist. He’s worked in Australia, Asia and Europe; delivered major projects for some of the world’s leading firms; and run a series of successful businesses in which he’s applied his architectural expertise in a range of exciting ways.
A family tradition
The son of Sydney architect Henry Tsang, who is best known for his contribution to Sydney’s Chinese Garden of Friendship, Samuel spent hours of his childhood at his dad’s office in Chinatown. Architecture was in his blood.
It was at his dad’s urging that he enrolled in the UTS degree, in large part because of the hands-on nature of the course – “He recommended UTS because it was actually the practical experience he wanted for me,” Samuel says.
Despite drifting through his studies, he somehow landed on his feet: a combination of inherent skill, his UTS credentials and experience working with his dad opened the door to a job in the Sydney offices of global architectural firm PTW.
After a year, Samuel moved to PTW’s Shanghai office and found himself working alongside inspiring architects from around the world. He contributed to competition bids and to major new developments that called on the extensive knowledge of master planning he’d gained at UTS. For the first time, he could feel his own passion for architecture coming to life.
An unlikely professional niche
During that same period, Samuel also started dabbling in some interiors work, eventually setting up his first company, Huge Design Studios. Supported by a small team, he led a series of boutique interiors projects that eventually progressed into commercial building work.
Life was good, but eight years later he was ready to move on from China. Indonesia, with its rapidly growing economy, beckoned.
“I met up with a friend from UTS who was based in Jakarta and we started working together on a few projects, mainly focused on shopping malls,” he says.
It was enough to convince Samuel to make the move to Jakarta. He established a studio, Tau, and started making a name for himself with a range of commercial design and property development projects. On one of these projects, he was asked to source a playground supplier to put together a play space as part of a new development, but there was no one in Indonesia who fit the bill.
Instead, he travelled back to Australia and China, meeting with suppliers and checking out the factories where the playgrounds were produced. But he still couldn’t find what he was looking for.
“So I decided okay, why don’t I try and learn this business myself?” he says.
The business of play
It was a serendipitous moment. Within a couple of years, Samuel had a thriving business, Explora Playgrounds, through which he has created and built more than 50 playgrounds across Indonesia. While not traditional architecture, this niche area of design calls on many of the skills he gained at university and throughout the early years of his career.
And the best part? He’s – really, truly – passionate about it.
“I love being able to design something in the digital and then build it really quickly in the workshop. With architecture, the process can be much longer,” he says.
In 2020, Samuel and his young family made the move to Europe, settling in Austria where his wife’s parents lived. To his surprise, the playground business was easy to transport.
“There are lots of capable interior design architects around the world, but specifically to do with childcare play spaces, there’s only a handful in each country,” he says.
While he’s gained new clients in Europe, he’s been able to maintain existing relationships in southeast Asia. The move has also opened up new markets in places like Dubai and Seychelles.
Not bad for a kid who once upon a time would have named himself least likely to succeed in his graduating class. In hindsight, he says, his UTS architecture degree prepared him to work – and work hard. And it has paid off in more ways than he can count.
That whole work ethic, which back then was quite painful, was what I needed. Now when you work in real life you carry that with you forever.
