About
Three decades designing environments, one diagnosis that changed the brief, and a body of work that now sits between the two.
For decades her brief was space: hotels, retreats, homes, the quiet choreography of how a room makes a person feel. The work taught her something harder to draw. Places do not only hold our lives. They participate in them.
In 2019 a cancer diagnosis changed the brief entirely, and the same design instinct turned inward. Who are we beneath what we do? What happens to identity when the plan is taken away? Her speaking begins there: at the meeting point of outer environment and inner architecture, where design experience and lived experience agree.
The Portfolio
Selected hotel, resort, and residential interiors from Ros Banksia-Smith’s design career.
Read the PortfolioHer story
01
Ros built her career in interior design and creative direction, founding her own practice and working across hospitality, residential and commercial environments. The through line was never decoration. It was how a place behaves towards the person inside it.
02
In 2019 she was diagnosed with cancer. Everything that had organised her days, the projects, the travel, the identity built around capability, stopped being the point. She began writing, largely to keep herself company.
03
That writing became COURAGE, published in 2021. It is not a manual and it does not claim a method. It is an honest record of fear, uncertainty, gratitude and the decisions that stay available when the big ones are taken away.
04
What followed was slower and more interesting than recovery language allows. She kept returning to one question: if environments shape people, what shapes the person doing the shaping? The Architecture of Becoming grew out of that.
05
Now based in Bali, Ros works through Banksia Collective and speaks internationally. The design career did not end. It changed scale. The brief moved from rooms to the person standing in them.
Banksia Collective
Banksia Collective is an independent advisory bringing property, hospitality and design into one room.
We work with owners, operators, and the principals who stand behind distinctive assets — quietly, at close range, on a small number of mandates.
The practice is designed to serve the asset and the people responsible for it — not the transaction.
Design authority
Hospitality in use, and the material decisions made long before it opens.
Disciplines
Her earlier body of work was produced through her own practice in Australia. Banksia Collective is the current chapter, not a retrospective label for what came before.
Recognition
Fellow, Design Institute of Australia
The Institute's senior professional grade, held for contribution to the discipline.
Senior Member, Asia Designer Communication Platform
Regional professional body connecting designers across Asia.
Former Global Brand Ambassador, REVĪVŌ Wellness Resorts
A wellness hospitality brand operating in Bali, appointed 2019.
