Jeremy McLeod

Founder & Director

Breathe Architecture

Melbourne

Jeremy McLeod is the founding Director of Breathe Architecture, a team of dedicated architects that have built a reputation for delivering high quality design and sustainable architecture for all scale projects.

Breathe Architecture was founded in 2001 by Jeremy McLeod and Tamara Veltre. Underpinning all of our work is the rigorous pursuit of sustainable design that is simultaneously beautiful, seemingly effortless, and environmentally positive. We have maintained our position at the forefront of sustainable design since inception; and through our award-winning built works, advocacy and design leadership, have built a reputation for delivering high quality architectural solutions.

Breathe are also the founders of the Nightingale Model, which was established in parallel with the inaugural project: Nightingale 1.0, commencing in 2014 and completed in 2017. Nightingale is a development delivery tool for deliberative, design-led, triple-bottom-line housing that has now evolved to become an independent, profit-for-purpose entity that is the keeper of the Nightingale intellectual property developed by us, and the custodians of the Nightingale purchaser wait list. Nightingale has garnered both local and global attention in the marketplace, and further differentiates and demonstrates Breathe’s ability to think laterally and productively to achieve new ways to deliver on our practice purpose.

Jeremy McLeod believes that architects, through collaboration, can drive real positive change in this city we call home.

Articles featuring Jeremy

Projects

Nightingale 1: A Sustainable and People-Centered Housing Development

This is old Brunswick, it’s industrial, and it’s run down, yet there exists a strangely endearing quality of this area – it’s people, it’s sense of community. It is a melting pot of migrant activity, everyone coming together to form one totally imperfect community. This is the home of Nightingale 1. Emerging from the success […]

Projects

The Commons – a Benchmark of Sustainable Development by Breathe Architecture

Welcome to our projects series where we present benchmarks of urban living – self developed by architects and creative city makers. This week we want to present you the apartment building The Commons by Melbourne based Breathe Architecture. We recently spoke with Jeremy McLeod, Founder of Melbourne based company Breathe Architecture. In the interview he told us that in […]

Interviews

The Nightingale Model: A Collaborative Movement for Sustainable, Affordable Housing in the City

Welcome back to Archipreneur Insights, the interview series with leaders who are responsible for some of the world’s most exciting and creatively disarming architecture. The series largely follows those who have an architectural degree but have since followed an entrepreneurial or alternative career path but also interviews other key players in the building and development […]

Products featuring Jeremy

Report #04

Architect and Developer:
A Case Study Handbook to Getting Started

In our Architect and Developer report you can read 10 interviews of practicing Architect and Developers who share their stories and how they got started with the first projects. Learn from their first-hand experiences and be inspired to start with your own project.

Read Report

Quotes from Jeremy

“So when I started Breathe Architecture the simple idea was that everything that I designed, everything that I worked on, needed to have a window that people could open so that they could breathe.”
When we started The Commons in 2007, I got "Together with six other architects, and we put together all of our money, borrowed against our houses, borrowed from other people and we raised about a million dollars. We started work on our own project."
"The role of Nightingale housing is to share our intellectual property with other architects in Melbourne and other cities around the country to help them establish their own Nightingale projects and to help deliver the housing that people so desperately need here."
"You can sit there and wait for the phone to ring, for a property developer or someone with a lot of money to call you and ask you to build the project that you were born to do. Or you can take some financial risk and do the project that you were born to do."
"But our profession has been manipulated by property developers, project managers, real estate agents, marketing teams and lawyers in this country in the way that architects take all the risk but they receive very, very little of the financial reward associated with the project."
"I think that the future for architects, it’s adapt, it’s evolve, or die. The choice is one of survival."