PRACTICAL completion has been reached on an 80-level apartment tower in Melbourne’s CBD, which will form part of the tallest twin skyscrapers in Australia.
Designed by Cox Architecture, Fender Katsalidis Architects and Hecker Guthrie, Queens Place Tower 1 is the first residential tower in 3L Alliance’s $1 billion project at 350 Queen Street, on the verge of Flagstaff Hill. The development comprises 810 apartments set above a six-level podium with 6,000 sqm of office space, retail precinct, and public plaza.
Singaporean property developer Teo Tong Lim and Roxy-Pacific Holdings teamed up to buy an existing office building on the site in 2020 for $145 million.
Chinese developer 3L Alliance won approval for the project in 2016, when fears of apartment oversupply in Melbourne were starting to mount. Late in 2021, SQM Research figures showed the CBD apartment vacancy rate was at 7.2% as COVID emptied major cities.
Amenities in the newly-built tower include a private cinema, library, poker and mah jong room, private garden terraces, karaoke suite and gym, and double-height amenities on level 51 and 52 including a pool, spa, sauna, dining rooms and resident lounge.
Final handovers for the project were completed amid the extended COVID lockdown in Victoria with 2,800 workers on-site throughout construction.
“Despite the restrictions of the site’s location and the scale of excavation required, the team employed a range of innovative construction techniques to deliver this outstanding project,” said Graham Cottam, regional managing director of Multiplex.
Several hundred architecturally designed fins are a signature feature of the building’s aesthetic, while the curtain wall façade of Queens Place includes over 11,000 custom-made façade panels and there is a custom anodised aluminium ‘Lantern’ roof screen on level 80.
The main feature lobby entrance contains over 2,000 individual anodised aluminum extrusion light fittings and crafted Italian marble stone slabs on the walls and columns.
Deep excavation works were successfully completed nine metres below the water table and involved a typical soldier pile design with shotcrete retaining walls and soil anchors.
Further complexity was added with the acoustically isolated pool structures due to the proximity to nearby apartments. A precast concrete pool shell was installed on custom high density rubber mounts and springs. A precast solution was adopted to provide time efficiencies, and lateral restraint pads were also installed due to wind and seismic loading.
Other major residential developments in the CBD include ICD Property Group’s 65-storey tower at 299 K ing Street, with 594 apartments, and Hong Kong-listed Far East Consortium’s $1 billion West Side Place project on the former The Age site at 250 Spencer Street that will have 1,376 apartments and a hotel component.
Also in the pipeline are major mixed-use projects that will have large residential components. The $2 billion Southbank by Beulah International will be the tallest building in the southern hemisphere at about 368 metres in height and will have 789 dwellings, while OSK Property’s $2.8 billion Melbourne Square precinct, also in Southbank, will have four residential towers with some 2,600 apartments.
