Andrew Glover will judge the 2025 Interior Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), joining Jade Whittaker, Melissa Leung, Conrad Lowry and jury chair Paul Hecker.

IDEA is Australia’s longest-running independent architecture and interior design awards program with winners selected annually by a panel of expert judges working in the industry.

GroupGSA associate director Andrew Glover brings over 20 years of interior design experience to this panel, with expertise in the workplace sector and a focus on the technical side of design and delivery of interior projects.

Andrew Glover’s career journey

Glover started out studying industrial design with aspirations to design furniture, but on graduating, his career path veered into interiors where he was able to focus on the design of joinery. He gained invaluable early experience working for an award-winning interiors firm in London, completing projects throughout Europe and the Middle East before returning home to Brisbane. 

With his expertise in large-scale, complex workplace projects, Glover’s specialties naturally aligned with GroupGSA, where he has been working for five years. His team has delivered numerous landmark interior design projects for global brands, such as Salesforce Tower Sydney (coming in at 20,000 square metres) and Microsoft Australia Headquarters in North Sydney (10,000 square metres).    

“Big projects are always challenging but rewarding,” he tells Australian Design Review. 

One particular large-scale workplace project he completed a few years ago comes with the impressive accolade of Queensland’s largest ever workplace fitout. This was the 75,000-square-metre integrated fitout of 1 William Street for the Queensland Government State Headquarters.

As one might imagine, a behemoth like Queensland Government State Headquarters brought about commensurate design challenges for Glover and his team.

“The team members that you work with throughout the process and the design resolutions that you have to come up with frequently, consistently and quickly lead to something that’s quite satisfying,” he says. “An experience like that stays with you.”

The importance of design and delivery

The Queensland Government State Headquarters project has literally stayed with Glover. From the vantage point of his new residence – a much smaller and more recent project he designed that is no less a career highlight – he has views of 1 William Street. Designing his own home came with a different kind of satisfaction, given he was the client, designer and builder. 

“It was an easy process from a design approvals perspective,” he says. 

According to Glover, some of his greatest challenges come through the construction phase of a project. However, he feels design delivery is a specialist capability he has honed to ensure that design integrity is maintained throughout the whole process.

“We as designers see fantastic opportunities and ideas with each brief, and we endeavour to hold them to their original intent through the entire process. Our challenge is to ensure the design integrity is maintained all the way through to project completion,” he says. 

Being a designer has enabled Glover to view spaces with the overlays of stakeholders, stories and processes he imagines worked for or against the final outcomes. He likes to discuss these shared challenges with other designers, uncovering how their ideas developed into what is tangible in the built environment.

“Because the end result is what the public sees,” he explains. “They potentially don’t have an understanding of the time and effort behind something, which is a culmination of a lot of requirements and varying constraints.”

When asked if this design knowledge inhibits him from enjoying the built environment as any layman would, Glover believes he both “wins more and loses more”.

“I walk into a space and I think I appreciate the efforts more than some people would, but then I would also examine the details more than other people as well,” he concludes.

What will Andrew Glover be looking for at IDEA?

When it comes to assessing IDEA entries, Glover will have one key consideration in mind. More than impressively framed photos and renders, creative design solutions to client problems stand out to him.

The IDEA Workplace Over 1000sqm category unsurprisingly excites him most, as does the Emerging Designer of the Year award. 

“Sometimes when older designers are thinking about the commercials, team resourcing, client repeat business – all those sorts of other factors that come in – you might get one result, but a younger designer with the same brief might come in with a completely different result,” he says. 

“I think that that comes through with emerging designers, so I’m excited to see what they come up with.”

Enter IDEA 2025

Entries to IDEA are open now. Submit yours before 27 April 2025 to save $100 on your initial entry. 

IDEA 2025 is brought to you by Overall Sponsor Miele, alongside category sponsors Crafted Hardwoods, Cult, Designer Rugs, ForestOne, MillerKnoll, Laufen and Zenith.