Today the Brave Has Turned Hibernian House Into an Art, Character, Friction-Filled Home

The first time Jade Manning and Vince Osmond visited Today the Brave’s new office space, they were getting tattooed. It was 2023, and the creative duo had made a bet: The indie was up for one of its first awards. Winning felt like a long shot. They promised to get matching tattoos if they did. “And so not the next day, but two days later,” Jade says, “we were literally at the end of this hall, getting tattooed on this very floor.”

The next time they stepped into the heritage-listed Hibernian House, it was with CEO Jaimes Leggett to consider it as the agency’s new home. Jade was thinking of the serendipitous tattoos, but now the floor was empty. “The toilets hadn't worked for 20 years. The piping was just open for 20 years. We're like, 'This is too much of a task. It just feels too impossible,'” Jade tells LBB, sitting in a light and airy meeting room in the now-completed space.

The grungy, labyrinthine, graffiti-caked, five-storey building near Sydney’s Central station has had many lives. Constructed in 1928 as the headquarters for the Irish Hibernian Australasian Catholic Benefit Society, it went on to house clothing factories, a brothel, a jazz club, and became a bohemian haven for creatives: its tenants include poets and painters, photographers and producers, and sound studio Mosaic. It hosts secret raves and music video shoots and performances. Painter Ben Frost told the ‘Sydney Morning Herald’ in 2010, “This place is more New York than New York.”

You enter via a grimy hallway that leads into a sticker-smothered elevator. The elevator stops. The doors open. A vestibule covered in more graffiti, this time fluorescent and glowing.

“I feel like I could be going to a club, I feel like I could be going to a gig,” Jade says. It feels “like a story that you're going to tell on Monday. ‘You'll never guess where I was on the weekend’ -- it feels like that sort of story.” You open another door, and step into Narnia.

Here is Today the Brave: a spacious gallery, a study of shadow and light, an “oasis”. Natural materials are plentiful -- wooden floorboards, sideboards, and feature walls; leather sofas; a marble plinth, coffee table, and kitchen countertops.

The deep green kitchen cabinets (and curved island) mirror the thin, emerald tiles in the bathroom. It’s as though the “more New York than New York” building now boasts a luxurious Williamsburg apartment.

The renovations have involved everything from fishing out spray cans from the old pipes -- “we actually had a chat today about all the cans they were pulling out of the plumbing to get the toilets working again” -- grinding back layers and layers of paint to get back to century-old hardwood timber floors that are now waxed and polished, knocking down walls to create a long flowing space, installing working toilets and running water, replacing broken window panes, choosing furniture and paint colours and layout, placing art. “It was a mammoth, mammoth task.”

Jade says of the decision to back the vision, “We'd go out in the beginning of the week, and we'd be super excited. And then you'd get doubts, doubts, doubts, doubts, doubts. And then we'd go, 'Fuck it. Let's go to the space again.' And we would leave on a high. It would be like, 'Fuck, no, it's the best thing. No, we're definitely doing it.'”

Jaimes notes, “We did all the design and architecture ourselves”; Jade adds a 3D scan helped with visualising “walking from this side of the office to that side, what the light’s doing at different times of the day."

He remembers one of the first decisions “that I’ll never forget.” The space had been demolished and stripped “bare to just this concrete shell.” The team had been working late nights on other projects and run out of time to pick paint colours.

“We arrived probably at about nine o'clock at night, after wrapping up a project, get into the building with all our little paint swatches, and realise there is no electricity, because obviously the demolition crew has cut it. So there's the three of us by phone light, painting little swatches, and trying to guess in the dark what colour is the best ... it was ridiculous.”

Restraint and respect have been key to the process -- making vast changes while preserving character and “maintaining those little elements of surprise,” like a bare section of wall complete with graffiti in the otherwise glossy bathroom. The team is still finding homes for “little artefacts from previous tenants”.

At a time characterised by consolidation and budgetary pressures, the space is a bold investment in taste, design, craft, and community, plus “time, effort, and belief in one another,” Jaimes confirms. “We’ve tripled our space while maintaining our outgoings. In hindsight, it feels like a no-brainer.”

The agency was previously in a smaller office in Haymarket, a 4-minute, L-shaped drive from Hibernian. Both spaces are rough-around-the-edges; last year, Today the Brave designed nang-shaped chocolates in a wink to the old office’s alleyway.

Asked when he knew whether the office project was an act of creative bravery or stupidity, Jaimes says, “When clients saw it for the first time. Their reactions to the space [were] exactly as we had hoped.” Vince admits, “There was plenty of debate about how clients would react when they first experienced it.” But they held tight to the push and pull, injecting the physical experience with memorable friction.

“This is a beautiful demonstration of how powerful friction can be if it's used in the right way,” Jade agrees. “It's the heart of every great creative idea.” He wants clients to visit the space and “appreciate what it takes to create an unexpected experience … We've deeply thought about the experience we want our clients to go on.”

Vince adds “there’s something powerful” about observing a client moving through the building. “You meet them out front, bring them through a foyer plastered with graffiti, into a lift covered in stickers and doodles, and then finally into our floor, where the juxtaposition really hits home. That contrast really tells the story about who we are and what we care about.”

The elevator ride is Jade’s “favourite part of the day”. He spends a few moments noticing the tiny changes to the “ever-evolving canvas”: a new sticker here, an extra scribble there. It isn’t precious. “It all changes overnight,” Vince says. “There’s an energy that keeps you on your toes.

“It's impossible not to be affected by this building. I reckon you absorb it all, whether you're conscious of it or not.”

Jaimes believes the proximity, and contribution, to that kind of creative spirit is money well spent. “If we were going to do it again, we wouldn’t change a thing.”

Jade adds, “This is probably the first time in my career where I felt like where we are is a reflection of our ambition to be part of culture, rather than just reflecting it back.”

He’s spent the past few weeks using Google’s reverse image search function and AI tools to learn more about the artists whose tags he sees daily. “The history is ridiculous. You've got some incredible international artists that have blown through here. There's residencies that have been in the building for years. Then I discovered a famous stained glass artist … It's all these little stories.”

One of the final, and most recent, decisions in the months-long process was art placement. The whole team weighed in, moving A4 placeholders around until the conversation between each piece felt right.

Next up is an upgrade of the terrace. There will be a barbecue, and a place to have a drink in summer. Jade is already using it, taking advantage of “small things like stepping out onto the balcony in the afternoon and hearing the band one floor below us practicing their jazz. You can't buy that.”

Just inside that Narnia-esque door, near the reception’s waiting area, sits a vintage tan leather tattoo chair. A nod to the past, and Jade and Vince’s bet. It resulted in two tatts of black cats, and an office that communicates quality, discernment, history, metamorphosis. As Jade says, it’s “quite an awesome story.”