Architect | Designer | Research in Regenerative Futures

Shei Teo is a registered architect (ARBV/NSW) and designer whose work explores the intersection of built environments, ecology, and exchange systems. Through AxST, she develops opportunities for regenerative urban living — from buildings and design systems to the economic and cultural frameworks that sustain them.

Over two decades of practice in multiple award-winning Australian practices, Shei has worked across housing, adaptive reuse, institutional, commercial, and mixed-use developments. Her practice is focused on projects that integrate social infrastructure and ecological harmony. Her international experience includes founding Cora Nepal, where she designed and realised boutique hotels and homes responsive to local environments, culture, and materiality, deepening her understanding of design embedded in place and community.

At AxST, her approach is quietly precise and deeply responsive, creating spaces from a design philosophy centred on belonging: places that hold, nourish, and enable people and communities to thrive.

Current projects include a mixed-use development and living laboratory for urban permaculture and adaptable, long-life design systems. Shei also leads Picoplan, a prototyping framework for small builds or scalable developments. It provides transparent costing, circular design processes, and fosters shared efficiencies and value within a guild of design-construct professionals and project stakeholders. Complementing these is PACT, a Project Access Commissioning Trust, an instance of a Participatory Capital Trust — which forms a “slow capital” resource base that redefines value exchange in design by combining cooperative funding, shared authorship, and procurement that rewards long-term stewardship over extractive processes.

Together, these initiatives form an integrated ecosystem: a regenerative architecture of both form, function and finance, grounded in principles of Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share.

Through AxST, Shei's practice and research bridge architecture, policy, and cultural economy — reimagining how creative and civic projects are conceived and realised. She will keep asking how to design with people and places, not just for them, and cultivating architecture and design practices as both physical and social urban ecology, that is resilient, participatory, and alive.