Best known for building some of Brisbane’s most luxurious homes over the past 12 years – for sports stars, models, musicians and business people including Darius Boyd, Stephen Moore, ex-couple Laura Dundovic and Quade Cooper, Cameron Smith, Aron Baynes, ex-couple Example and Erin McNaught, Jude and Graham Turner and more – the brothers now have their sights set on an even grander vision.

Sitting at a riverfront home they recently completed in Indooroopilly, they reveal they’re planning to build luxury hotels around the country, first in Brisbane and the Gold Coast.

“We want them to be lifestyle precincts that offer amazing experiences and amenities. We travel a lot and a hobby of ours is staying in nice hotels. We get a lot of inspiration from little parts of so many hotels we’ve stayed at around the world but we want to do something that is unique,” Rob, 34, says.

Inspired by European summer culture and the high-end Aman resorts scattered around the globe, they hope to open their first hotel in the next decade.

“We’d like to do what they (Aman) have done but around Australia. They’re not traditional hotels. It’s all about lifestyle and resort living. It’s not just somewhere to sleep for the night, it’s somewhere you go as a destination that has a feeling,” Rob says.

Until then, the highly ambitious siblings with an active pipeline worth $328m have big short-term plans. The first is taking their hugely successful and multi-award winning design, construction and development business Graya in a new direction, focusing on apartments.

It’s a move sure to upset many of the marketing savvy company’s 153,700 Instagram followers and the prospective homebuyers with multimillion-dollar budgets who dream of one day buying a Graya house.

“We will continue to do houses but very rarely,” Andrew, 38, says.

“We always had a passion for quality design and quality projects. We started with houses but as we started to do more than one house at a time – all architecturally designed, all very detailed, all very complicated – just the amount of management required for those houses, you could apply the same amount of management and do 20 apartments.

“If we wanted to grow the business the only way to do that was to progress into apartments.

That was always the plan and it just took us a bit of time to get to that point to be comfortable to make the move.”

Tennis superstar Ash Barty has taken advantage of the pivot, buying an apartment for a reported $4m in Graya’s Palm Beach complex, Kloud. Currently under construction, it’s due for completion in late 2025. Other apartment projects include Arc in Toowong, Chalk, York and Maison in New Farm, Ripple in Palm Beach and Canvas in Bulimba.

Kloud and Chalk were designed by Graya’s in-house team which includes six architects. The Grays have worked with some of Brisbane’s most esteemed architecture firms over the years including Joe Adsett, Bureau Proberts, Tim Stewart, KP Architects and Cavill Architects, and they plan to continue collaborating while designing more of their own projects.

“I’m super passionate about design,” Rob says. “Initially when we worked with a lot of architects that was one thing in the background that sort of hurt my soul a little bit. You kind of feel like you’re a gun for hire. You build this product then go do that product and you kind of feel like you don’t have your own identity.

“That’s one of the reasons why we hired a design team and now our briefs to outside architects are a lot more thorough. We even have outside architects come to us and pitch, ‘you’re going to want it like this because this is the Graya look’, which is kind of cool.”

Sculptural and dramatic – that’s how the brothers want their work to be remembered.

“We’re doing things that are sculptural with lots of drama and curves and things that make a project iconic. Everything we do we want to be a landmark. We want people to know, that’s a Graya project,” Rob says.

A timber cubby house in the back yard of their childhood home in Brookfield was one of the first things they built together, with dad’s help.

“We loved that cubby house. It wasn’t anything flash but it was quite big – about 2.5m x 2.5m,” Rob says.

But they didn’t get to play in it for long, moving seven times as their parents bought, renovated and sold for a tidy profit the houses they lived in around Brisbane’s western suburbs. Their parents, Stuart and Davina Gray, moved to Brisbane from South Africa before the boys were born, with Stuart going on to establish a successful quantity surveying business, Gray Robinson and Cottrell, now GRC.

“He is the best mentor,” Rob says.

“We still ask him for advice and bounce ideas off him,” Andrew adds.

Their upbringing and exposure to the industry from such an early age had a big impact on the brothers, who used to raid building sites looking for treasures.

“We were essentially seeing the construction process before we were even comprehending what it was,” Rob says.

“When we moved to Chapel Hill, our parents subdivided the land and built a house next door to where we lived. When we got home from school we used to go across to the building site and hang out with the builders. We were there every afternoon and we’d collect all the nails and screws. We were fascinated by the different types – framing nails glued together in strips for nail guns and different types of batten screws made from gal and zinc in all these different fancy colours I really liked. We kept them in ice-cream tubs.”

By the time they were teenagers attending Ipswich Grammar School, they’d already decided to go into business together one day.

Andrew – the more academic of the two – followed his father’s footsteps into quantity surveying.

“Rob wasn’t too good with his school grades but I was,” Andrew teases, throwing a knowing glance at his younger sibling.

“Straight after school I was working and studying full-time. I didn’t really enjoy traditional quantity surveying, it wasn’t really for me, but I worked that out pretty quickly. I later got put into a part of the company I did really enjoy, which was dealing with other developers and banks.”

As for Rob, he liked working with his hands so decided to do a carpentry apprenticeship.

“The thought of me going to uni and sitting in classrooms – I was never going to do it, it just didn’t suit my personality. I preferred to learn on the go, I didn’t like book learning,” he says.

They swear there was never any sibling rivalry between them. They both loved sports growing up, learnt the value of discipline and teamwork playing rugby union, and followed their parents’ strong work ethic. Their mum came from a teaching background and later worked with their dad in the family business.

“Mum always says hard work is the most important thing,” Andrew says.

“Mum and Dad are both very disciplined and hardworking. There are no shortcuts. We were always in a good routine and never allowed to slack off. Whatever we wanted to pursue, we had to give it our all and do it properly.”

After 10 years working for his father’s business, he decided it was time to move on.

“I could see all the other developers and their projects and what they were doing and I was like, why can’t I do this?” Andrew says.

In 2012, the brothers joined forces to start their own company and haven’t looked back.

Starting with small extensions and renovations, they quickly moved on to bigger and better builds.

Using their different strengths, they now look after various parts of the business. While Andrew handles the front end, acquisitions, finance, design and approvals, Rob takes care of marketing, construction and sales.

What do they love most about what they do? For Andrew, it’s the art of the deal and seeing the end product. For Rob, it’s making an impact on the Brisbane landscape.

“We do have our moments,” Andrew says.

“We don’t agree on everything but us fighting and falling out is not going to help our business, our staff or us. We’re working together to achieve the same goals.”

Rob agrees. “It’s a super weird bond where there’s no ego, no competition and we can fully disagree, but as soon as we’ve finished the conversation it’s like we’ve completely forgotten about it and we move on. It’s a mindset we’ve always had that the little things don’t matter. We’re a team. We’re focused on the outcome and how to get there,” he says.

Expanding the business to the Gold Coast is the next major move. All going to plan, Rob will move into a brand new Graya home with ocean views in Burleigh Heads mid-year with his wife Meghan, a psychologist, and their son Hayes, 1.

Called Dune, it is inspired by their previous family home in Paddington – Arcos – which set a suburb record when it sold for $8.2m in 2022.

“Having a landmark home on the Gold Coast as we set up the business in that area is a good business decision but also a fun project. We always liked the idea of living at the coast, plus I want to get back into surfing,” Rob says.

Andrew will stay put in Brisbane with his wife Larissa, a full-time mum, and their two daughters, Grace, 3, and Lila, 2.

Both brothers admit that juggling modern day fatherhood with growing the company has its challenges, but reassessing their priorities has made things easier.

“We still work just as hard as before, but there’s been certain things we’ve had to sacrifice,” Andrew says.

“Once you have kids you become more focused on the family than going out.”

After they move, Rob can’t wait to spend time with Meghan and Hayes embracing their new lifestyle down the coast.

“Parenting is a lot more responsibility. I thought I was super, super busy before kids but I have to be a lot more organised now,” he says.

“It’s a bit of a battle in your own head to get out of certain habits, it’s been challenging that’s for sure, but I love being a dad and Hayes is everything we’ve dreamed of.”

Rob is already planning to bring Hayes into the family business one day and has started taking him to site visits on the weekends.

“I want to get him familiar with being on a construction site. At the moment he really likes the diggers,” he says.

Whether building homes, building a family or building dreams – the Gray brothers are all in.