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Ros Banksia-Smith

About

Designer first.
Everything else followed from it.

Three decades designing environments, one diagnosis that changed the brief, and a body of work that now sits between the two.


Recognition and credentials

Fellow, Design Institute of AustraliaAuthor, COURAGEFounder & Creative Partner, Banksia CollectiveFormer Global Brand Ambassador, REVĪVŌ Wellness ResortsSenior Member, Asia Designer Communication Platform

Ros has spent a career designing the environments people live inside. Her deepest work now asks a different question: what is designing the person inside them?

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.

Ros Banksia-Smith holding a guest's hands in a warm welcome outdoors
The work is design experience and lived experience, in the same person.

Her story

A career in design. A life that changed the question.

01

A creative life

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

The interruption

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

Courage

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

Becoming

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

The next chapter

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.

Ros Banksia-Smith walking and talking with a guest in a gardenRos Banksia-Smith laughing with her arm raised at an outdoor gathering
Ros, in conversation and in community
Layered volcanic ridgelines in soft morning mist
Bali, where the work is based today

Design authority

She didn't study human experience from the sidelines. She spent decades designing for it.

A calm hospitality lounge with timber screens and linen chairs opening to tropical greenery
Stone, linen and rattan samples beside an open sketchbook of architectural drawings

The design language: natural material, quiet structure, rooms that let people arrive.

Disciplines

  • Hospitality design
  • Interiors
  • Creative direction
  • Brand and guest experience
  • Place-making

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.

Browse the design portfolio · Banksia Collective

Some rooms need more than another presentation.