Ross Perrett

Ross Perrett is an architect, landscape architect, planner and golf-course designer. This multidisciplinary background suited an era when golf projects extended beyond eighteen holes to roads, hotels, housing, natural areas, irrigation and regulation. He joined Peter Thomson and Michael Wolveridge’s practice in the 1980s, became a partner and later led the firm with Thomson. Thomson Wolveridge Perrett and then Thomson Perrett dominated much of the Australian market for decades. Perrett worked on more than eighty projects in China, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Egypt, Britain, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong and Australia. Sites ranged from rice paddies and deserts to protected marine landscapes, volcanic slopes and complex residential developments. Moonah Links, The National Ocean, Hamilton Island, Capital and Carya are among significant projects. His contribution often lay in masterplanning, coordination of constraints and conversion of a player’s vision into buildable documents. The firm generally pursued a links-like appearance, even in tropical climates. This produced successes but also limitations where soils and grasses could not support genuine firmness. Following Peter Thomson’s death, Perrett continued the practice and formed Perrett Webb with champion Karrie Webb, in accordance with Thomson’s wishes. The new firm connects a career architect’s experience with the perspective of a great player. Perrett remains an important figure in the internationalisation of Australian design. His work is less defined by a single visual form than by the ability to understand large systems and deliver projects under difficult conditions. A living architect, he has limited reliable personal data in public sources, so no birth date is invented. His legacy is that of a landscape organiser able to unite architecture, planning and development economics.