At just 28, Liam McGroarty and business partner Oliver Collinge have designed for some of Manchester’s most high profile residential schemes.
The pair’s Northern Quarter design studio YOUTH, which they founded four years ago after meeting at the University of Manchester, was chosen to design more than 500 apartments at the Kampus development by Capital and Centric.
McGroarty describes himself as a “product of Manchester”, having grown up just outside the city, attending college in Oldham and art school at the University of Manchester, where he met Collinge.
After coming out of art school, McGroarty said the thought of moving down to London never tempted him, despite it being presented as the “thing to do”.
He said: “The thing to do was to come out of university, go and work for two years in London and earn your stripes and then potentially look at moving back but every time we went down to London we were completely like ‘we’re not up for this, we’re not doing this’.
“You’re a small fish in a big pond, whereas Manchester is very accepting and says ‘yeah you can play in this bar’ or ‘yeah, you can do that’.
“It seemed a bit more open to giving people opportunity, so I felt Manchester has got a bit more warmth and approachability.”
When the pair left university, having both gained first-class degrees, Collinge and McGroarty were picked up by Manchester agencies Space Invader and Spacemen, respectively.
Most Read
“While I was at Space Men, I designed for Adidas, RollsRoyce, Guinness, so I worked with a lot of brands and a lot of prestigious projects and... on the other side to that Ollie was working for AstraZeneca and Adidas in Stockport, so we both were in different sectors within interior design.”
It was at Space Men where McGroarty had the opportunity to travel and experience design in European cities.
“I was going to places like Copenhagen, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Berlin and then coming back to Manchester and asking ‘why are we not on the same level in terms of design, in terms of cool spaces and being design-conscious?’.”
After working separately, the pair were brought back together again when a university friend asked them to design their new burger restaurant.
“Our friend was opening a burger restaurant with his brother in Worcester called Hanbao and he messaged Ollie asking him to design it and we both jumped at the chance and did it as a hobby on the side.
“After work we’d meet up at Ply and we’d design this restaurant and on the weekends we would drive down to Worcester and measure this grade-II listed building that was really wonky and it took us hours and...that was the start of it all.”
But the business really took off after the pair were asked to design an animal hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Don’t miss
He says: “We had a little rented studio with other designers in Salford that we worked from and then we got this job in Saudi.
“We knew someone from university whose family are from Saudi and her mum was opening an animal hospital and she wasn’t happy with what the architects were doing.
“So she called us and said would you guys have a look at it.
“That’s how we eventually left our companies and that’s what got us going.
“Once we were signed up to design the animal hospital, we got space in Islington Mill and started designing it from there.
“We knew Tim Heatley from Capital and Centric, we got in contact with Tim, and he asked us to look at a project in Liverpool and we started working on that and then it just snowballed and then we got invited to pitch for Kampus.”
While YOUTH’s style is often described as Scandi, McGroarty disagrees, saying it has a “good mix” of different styles.
“We always describe it as refined rawness, where it has the elegance and consideration and the elements of Scandi design but I also think there is a bit of Manchester in what we do.”
YOUTH are currently involved in the Excelsior development in Castlefield, where the team has designed the interior architecture for the whole building and the 108 apartments it features.
“Here at Excelsior, we’ve got dark corridors with exposed metal grid ceilings and I think once we get the corridors complete that will be a real statement and a real feature.
“That’s how we do that juxtaposition of going from an apartment that feels very nice and homely and quite light and airy to then going to something that’s quite bold and has an attitude.”
McGroarty says YOUTH are “very outspoken” with developers, beyond the interior design aspect of a development.
“We’ll say ‘well that’s a bit rubbish’ or ‘do something a bit different or more exciting’ because the schemes we’re working on, everybody’s looking over their shoulder, but we think about what we can do that’s a little bit more unique to a brand.
“The first thing we do is get rid of any kind of reception because it’s such a dated thing.
“We’re very passionate about developing spaces that people will use.
“You’ll see it in a lot of developments around town where they have put in token dumbbells, rowing machine and they’re dead and no one ever uses them so we always like to create something that’s a bit more progressive and we think how people might use that space differently.”
Financially, McGroarty says YOUTH is ‘doing well’.
He says: “In 2019 we doubled turnover and this year we’re just making a little bit more than what we turned over previously.
“We’ve also just taken on our fifth person. For about two years we hit a ceiling of four people and couldn’t find a way of getting through that and then this year we’ve been really busy.”
However, while good financials are important, McGroarty says they don’t “chase turnover” as “our brand is what we measure ourselves by”.
“We’ve seen it at other companies we’ve worked for where it’s grown from a nice little team to where it’s exploded and the whole design aesthetic, the brand, and the message and ethos kind of gets lost.”
McGroarty says running a business is equally enjoyable as focusing on the design aspect of the job.
“I think it’s both in mine and Ollie’s personalities and character that we would’ve had a business of some sort and luckily we can combine the two.
“But running a business, when you’ve got employees and your employees are like saying certain things about work, you start seeing it from a completely different other angle, so it’s massively hard.
“There’s a lot of sleepless nights in the sense that you worry about getting painters on site and getting things ordered but at the same time everyday is always exciting.”