Linda Gregoriou is on a flying visit to the city of her birth when I catch up with her at Brunetti’s cafe in City Square at the business end of Melbourne’s Swanston Street. Close-by is where the city’s Occupy movement was so unceremoniously moved on months before, but we leave a chat about corporate greed and the malign affects of globalisation for another time. Not that another interpretation of globalisation isn’t a factor in Linda’s life and work, but more on that later. We’re here to sip lattes and talk about Linda’s remarkable journey from town planner to investment banker with Macquarie Bank, to heading up Sydney’s preparations for the 2000 Olympics and her latest incarnation as a retail pioneer.
With a resume that includes publishing, lecturing and broadcasting, (including being a judge on the ABC’s New Inventors) – to say Linda Gregoriou has a few strings to her bow is something of an understatement. Her most recent achievement is in retail. Sydney’s newest and funkiest home-wares shops that she founded last May – Pure and General has been described as one of the most unique retail concepts in Australia.
Full-to-bursting with exquisite curated products that are simply not found anywhere else in the country, the store has been quickly feted by Sydneysiders and good design devotees as ‘the’ place to shop. The idea was born, says Linda, from a reaction to ‘disposable’ consumer products.
“Living in inner Sydney I was constantly amazed to see all the discarded domestic debris strewn about the streets,” says Linda. “I wanted to purchase products with an enduring quality, just like the laundry basket my grandmother passed onto my mother, who in turn passed it on to me. If I wanted such items then it was likely that others did too. ”
Why Pure and General? “Pure, in the sense that all products stocked have a sense of authenticity, of integrity. General, in that it’s about thoughtfully designed everyday objects. Bamboo brushes and brooms sourced from an eight-generation artisan in Kyoto, Laotian paper light shades, hand-blocked Indian cushions and throws. So it’s about presenting things that have an enduring quality.” Linda spent a year combing the globe for objects to stock before opening the shop. Regular overseas trips to source new products are part and parcel of her approach and buying online is anathema to this widely-travelling entrepreneur. Commissioning artisans worldwide is central to Linda’s entrepreneurial sales philosophy.
To get an idea of quite how ambitious Linda’s hands-on approach is; to create a range of unique kitchenware furnishings and textiles, she worked with 16 artisans in Marrakech for a month. Anything further from the ‘off the shelf’ systems of the retail trade industry would be hard to find. There’s a largely hidden consistency of thought that marks Linda’s newest enterprise.
“For me it’s moving from the macro – cities and property development, to the micro,” she says. “My work has always been about how good design adds value. Now it’s about the home, rather than the urban infrastructure.”
The eldest daughter of Cypriot dad Andrew and mum Lala Watkins, Linda Gregoriou grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton. “I didn’t like my school years,” says Linda, “especially my secondary school. I didn’t feel that I fitted anywhere. Probably my fondest memory was leaving school at 17 and not getting expelled!” “Having an anglo-celtic background, my mother was the president of the young Liberals in Victoria, which is amusing because my father was a very staunch Labor voter, so I was a product of extremes,” says Linda.
When her mum died tragically young, dealing with the grief, says Linda, transformed the child she was into the adult she became. “I was in my early 20s. My mum’s death taught me how to value whatever you’re doing, the present, the here and now, and not to think too much about what might happen in the future or about what happened in the past.
“People say to me ‘you’ve done so many different things’, and I’m sure it’s because my mother died young. She was 51, I’m 47. I think in three or four years time it could all be over. It made me focused and want to achieve.” Linda spent her student days in Melbourne. She gained an arts degree at Monash University before a post grad in Urban Design and a Masters in Urban Economics.
“After uni I wanted to learn how the machinations of the property industry worked, so I worked for a real estate agent. Everybody said I was mad to do it because I’d just been studying, and I had a more intellectual background, but it taught me how to negotiate.” “I then worked in town planning. I was very conscious of serving an apprenticeship in a funny way, because what I always wanted to do was property development. In 1988, at 24-years-old, Linda landed a top job for the City of Port Phillip in Melbourne that coincided with a concerted effort to revitalise the city. “I was young to have a position as head of strategic planning. I happened to be in the right place at the right time.
“Melbourne’s an architectural laboratory and has been for a long time. There’s innovation and vision here. It was an exciting time,” says Linda, who married her duties as urban planner to those of publisher – resulting in the international journal Polis that bound together approaches to art, architecture, urban design and economics. By 1993, her work in Melbourne had taken her to Sydney, to lead the development of the masterplan for 2000 Sydney Olympics. The high-powered job, coordinating the design and build of the 16 hectare Olympic site wasn’t for the faint-hearted.
“It was incredibly political,” says Linda, who used Melbourne as the basis for the site’s design.
“We did it in a grid and there were a whole load of environmental considerations, because it was the first time such issues had been put into an Olympics. “It was huge amount of stress. At one level it was great fun. It was very international and that’s how I like to function. But it was tough, and it made me tough. “I was 29 and female. And probably worst of all, I was from Melbourne. I was given a hard time. People would say, a 45-year-old man should be doing this job. I’d say, ‘don’t worry I think like one’.”
After nearly three years, literally establishing the foundations for the Sydney Olympics, Linda had had enough of the politics and the endless lobbying the job entailed. Together with business partner architect Dale Jones-Evans, it was time to concentrate on her own business and follow her creative heart. With the formation of the FTB Group, Linda and Dale created a vehicle to realise their shared vision: how good design adds value. So began her award-winning domestic and commercial property redevelopment business which continues to trade.
In 2006, Linda’s beady eye was drawn to another project. “I needed my brain stimulated in a different way. I’d spent years on building sites, running them, and in between, advising, doing TV, and I wanted to learn more about finance,” says Linda. Introduced to the corporate directors of Macquarie Bank, the investment bank’s head of property asked Linda to join them. “I said ‘what do you want me to do?’, and he said ‘think laterally’.”
Not that Linda could think any other way. So began Linda’s career as an investment banker, adding value once again, this time to Macquarie Bank’s real estate portfolio in domestic and overseas markets.
“Working with Macquarie Bank taught me about how to undertake due diligence, that crucial aspect of financial business planning,” says Linda, who then put her energies into establishing her first retail business,” says Linda, who spent two years at Macquarie before a timely move away from international banking. In 2008, the Global Financial Crisis directly resulted in Macquarie Bank abolishing its real estate capital department.
The urbane Ms Gregorio had her sights set on another project: her first retail business. Pure and General, housed in the 1930s art deco building that Linda’s property company redeveloped, is the most recent in a long line of spaces Linda has built – spaces to live, work, play and prosper in. As we finish our coffees, with one of Melbourne’s great landmarks in the distance – the towering Manchester Unity Building on the corner of Collins and Swanston – Linda’s reflections on the differences between Melbourne and Sydney, reveal as much about herself as the cities themselves.
“This is a different sort of town. It’s mannered, polite, there’s a pride here. In Sydney, there’s a pride, but it’s about money, the survival of the fittest.” “Here in Melbourne you had a flat basalt plain. It goes that far back. You had to make something out of nothing,” says Linda, whose life and work has been forged by both cities.
And with that, the new “shop girl” as she describes herself, who has made so much, achieved so many things, disappears into the bustling metropolis that first inspired her.