People.
One industry. Known deeply. By people who helped document it.
Dean Dewhirst. Founder.
I've been placing senior leaders since 1998, and working exclusively with architecture and design practices since founding Maven in 2009.
In that time I've sat with hundreds of founders, Principals and boards at the moment their firm's future hinged on one appointment. And I've sat with hundreds of leaders at the moment they realised their next chapter had found them.
I work differently to recruiters. Every search is retained, research-led and run personally, end to end. No database mailouts. No volume model.
And I measure success one way: fit. The right leader, in a role that genuinely elevates both the practice and their career. Some of my proudest conversations ended with a leader staying exactly where they were.
If I've reached out to you, it's because I believe something better is on the table.
Nichola Garvey. Director of Research.
Nichola leads Maven's research: the market mapping that happens before any leader ever hears from us. Every search begins with her work, building a picture of the entire market, not just the visible fraction, so that when an invitation carries your name, it's because the research said it should.
Nichola has spent more than two decades close to Australian architecture as a writer, researcher and publisher. She created and produced the 20 Stories series, interviewing many of the country's most respected practice leaders about how their careers were actually built.
That work shapes how she researches now. A considered approach is not a list of names pulled from a database. It is an understanding of who is doing the work, who they are doing it with, and why a particular practice might matter to them at this point in their career.
Why leaders take our call
We know your world.
Not "the property sector." Your world. Which practices are winning the work you want to do, which studios are genuinely design-led and which just say so, what a Principal pathway actually looks like firm by firm.
We'll tell you the truth.
Including when the honest answer is stay where you are. A move only makes sense if it makes sense for you.
We play the long game.
Many leaders we place first spoke to us years earlier. A coffee today is never wasted.
The 20 Stories series.
We didn't just work in this industry. We published it.
Before Maven was a search firm with a decade and a half of appointments behind it, we spent years listening to this industry tell its own story. The result was the 20 Stories series: two books capturing Australia's leading practitioners in their own words.
From the Ground Up: 20 Stories of a Life in Architecture. Edited by Dean Dewhirst. Uro Publications, 2014.
Twenty of Australia's leading architects on what drew them to their calling, from Philip Cox and Neil Durbach to Ninotschka Titchkosky and Richard Kirk. Described by Houses magazine as an unprecedented account of the human forces shaping our cities. Now out of print, and quietly treasured on studio shelves around the country.
View the book
Chasing the Sky: 20 Stories of Women in Architecture. Introduced and edited by Dean Dewhirst. Foreword by Maryam Gusheh. ORO Publishers.
Twenty of Australia's most dynamic women in architecture on craft, collaboration, entrepreneurship and the culture of making. A book about equitable, vital architectural careers, which is to say, a book about exactly what Maven exists to build.
View the book
When we say we know the people in this industry, we mean we've sat with them, recorded them, edited them and put them in print.