Meet the team
Between us we cover planning strategy, urban design, feasibility and the approvals process, end to end.
Istvan runs the planning and feasibility side of the practice. He came up through architecture and urban design before moving into planning strategy. He has spent his career at the early, high-stakes point in a project — the decisions made before a single drawing is finalised — and built whatcani.build around the conviction that good planning advice should land before the money's spent, not after.
He works directly with developers and builders on zoning strategy, feasibility, and the policy arguments that get good projects through council. That means reading a site the way an assessment planner will — controls, context, and precedent together — and shaping the case for approval early, while there is still room to change course cheaply.
Nathan is the design-literate half of the practice — he reads plans, sections and massing fluently enough to pick up planning issues while a scheme can still be changed cheaply. Before co-founding whatcani.build, he worked across residential and mixed-use projects managing the DA and CDC process end to end, from first lodgement through to determination.
He leads pre-design and approvals work, translating planning controls into briefs that architects can actually design to, and planning reports that councils can approve. That dual fluency — design on one side, planning policy on the other — is what keeps a project moving between the drawing board and the assessment desk without expensive rework in between.