Packing a suitcase full of tiny seeds of Australian native grasses is part of her role as a creative director for the 2018 Architectural Biennale in Italy - definitely a high point in Wright's career.

Often the biennale is full of all sorts of grand ideas, but the Melbourne architect is bringing us back to basics by filling the Australian pavilion with grass plants and images of environmentally sensitive buildings to make us think about the effect that structures have on their locations.

Wright and her work/life partner Mauro Baracco will work with artist Linda Tegg to create an Australian grassland of 50,000 plants at the biennale - and they're growing right now in a nursery in northern Italy.

It has been a great year for the surfing, environmentally sensitive architect, whose practice recently won the top residential award for Victorian architecture for a striking house in North Fitzroy.

"The [biennale] theme of repair has come about through the things that I love - I love gardening, I love plants, I love being outside, I love the beach and I love the natural environment," she says.

Wright was born in Perth but grew up in Sydney's northern beaches where she became a passionate surfer. South Narrabeen was her favourite spot to hang out.

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"The coast in Victoria is incredible and I remade my relationship with the coast when I moved here in my 20s. The west coast, around Bells Beach, is very wild and not urbanised."

Wright still loves to surf and goes to the beach most weekends. The young family has a very modest holiday house near the beach - really more of a semi-permanent tent with transparent walls, which she and Baracco designed.

The beach shack's not for everyone, she admits. It's hot in summer and cold in winter but it has minimal impact on the landscape.

Wright believes surfing keeps her connected to nature and gives her space to figure out the design process.

After studying interior design at UTS, she came to Melbourne to enrol in architecture at RMIT where she now teaches.

"Melbourne's a town that's pretty kind to its architects and is generally ready to invest in younger architects," she says.

She and partner Mauro (RMIT associate professor of architecture and design) formed Baracco + Wright in 2004. Is working and living together difficult?

"We have extremely similar ideas and feelings about things," she says. "I have more of a day-to-day role in the office."

The practice is small as the couple prefers to have control over the projects they take on. They want to do more than design "nice" houses and cafes, she says.

They like projects that help repair the landscape, offer something to the public or have a community component. They have worked on the Fitzroy Community School, designed a weekender out of old farm buildings and created the award-winning Rose house near Edinburgh Gardens. (It won this year's Australian Institute of Architects' highest residential award for Victorian architecture, the Harold Desbrowe-Annear Award.)

Wright isn't the sort of person to blow her own trumpet. After chatting for an hour, she fails to mention that she and her partner won the top award. The most she will say is that it was humbling to be acknowledged for the work.

"I'm nearly 42 and that's a great age to be," Wright says. "There's a mood around that's aligned with some of the things we have been talking about for a long time; not that we were ahead but maybe we were operating a bit on the margins."

A sloping garden in a Kew renovation was a turning point for the architect because it brought the importance of the garden into focus.

"In the past 10 years we've been shifting in our practice to have projects that have a component of landscape."

Everything is linked to the natural environment and architects need to consider their role in land use, she says.

We definitely should not be clearing land to build new houses, she says. "There's a much longer-term cost with the clearing of eco systems that are quite rare."

That's why Wright decided to highlight the importance of indigenous grasses and chose western plains grassland plants, of which only 1 per cent remain.

She's hoping to also grow a native orchid, one of a handful of surviving species, for the biennale next May-October 2018.

The architect, who co-wrote a book on Robin Boyd, Spatial Continuity last year, lives and works in inner-city Northcote.

"People should think of a site as something that connects to a river or a waterway or a wildlife corridor as there is always a larger system you are working in."

architecture.com.au/venicebiennale