376-382 New South Head Road, Double Bay NSW

Summary

This four-storey office building with street-front retail shops is the winner of the Best Commercial Architecture in the 2007 NSW RAIA Award for Commercial Architecture and receives a commendation for Sustainable Architecture. It is also the finalist in the 2007 Property Council of Australia’s Bassett Innovation and Excellence Award for Sustainable Development. The building features sustainable water, sewage and passive ventilation systems and a productive roof top garden. There is no on-site parking.

The development demonstrates market acceptance of on-site water collection and re-use. It also provides insight into the challenges for operating a building to its design performance for a range of different tenants as well as challenges with development consent.

Developer: Fivex Commercial Property
Architects: Eeles Trelease Pty Ltd
Sustainable design: Michael Mobbs
Completed: Early 2007
Project size: Site: 549.9sqm
Site Costs: Site acquisition costs: $9.6million
Construction Costs: c. $5 million
Sustainability Premium: c $500,000 net

Checklist of sustainable features

Energy
Indoor Environmental Quality
Productivity
Water
Transport
Others:

Motivations and lessons

The owner’s view – an interview with Lesli Berger (General Manager, Fivex Commercial Property)

4 July 2007

What are the main reasons why your company chose to do a sustainable building?

The main reason is personal conviction. We are a family business and my family has been involved in the property industry for over 30 years. This is a landmark site and we thought we could do something special architecturally and without detracting from that give something back to the community.

The Brief from my father was very unusual “do what you like but don’t lose money.” This gave me the ability to pay for the discretionary sustainability technologies and systems that we needed to make the building a truly sustainable development. It would have been difficult to build a sustainable building otherwise.

Intrinsically we understood that water and energy are precious resources and shouldn’t be squandered. It doesn’t matter if you’re an environmental sceptic. It’s about valuing precious resources and we know that water and energy are seriously under valued in our economy. Over time this will change. It has to change.

Interestingly, we chose to go down this path two and a half years ago well before Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth and we didn’t realise that environmental issues would become mainstream. Michael Mobbs did tell us at the time that we would get good publicity, however, we were very sceptical. As it turns out the publicity has been an amazing benefit for our reputation although it was never a major motivation for us to go down this path. We’ve had great publicity but now that these issues are becoming more mainstream, I think it will be harder in the future for buildings to use sustainability for publicity purposes.

We also just wanted to see what was possible. I was a former Councillor on Woollahra Council. A lot of people were talking about sustainable design and I always wondered why no one was actually doing it. Now I know the reasons why. Reasons why people don’t go sustainable:

What are the best things that have come out of doing a sustainable building?

It has raised our profile. We’re not just another voracious property developer. We are seen as a responsible company who do property development and are trying to do the right thing.

It’s also given us the opportunity to meet quite a few interesting people. Alan Jones the broadcaster is one – he officially opened our development. It has been very positive for us to meet him and get him on side.

We have gotten a lot of kudos from this project. We just won the NSW RAIA award for Commercial Architecture. This is really an extraordinary result – they say in their own blurb for the prize that normally the large office towers win the prize – and here we are a suburban office development and we’ve won the prize. It’s a testament to the skills of the architect Eeles Trelease Pty Ltd. We also received a commendation for sustainability, testament to Michael Mobbs and his expertise.

What are the things that you did that made the project work well?

The use of natural light throughout the building is probably the single most important thing for our users and something they comment on. Coupled with that we’ve got some very clever shade structures to minimise the amount of direct heat. It’s something that attracts people to the building and makes them feel good inside. It also means they don’t have to use as much energy to operate the building.

Commercially, the former building was a red brick bank building – it had no street presence. But we’re on a corner and where there was all this red brick and passive street front, we activated all three corners with pretty much wall to wall retail frontages. This is fantastic from an urban design perspective and is also the highest and best use of the space.

There is no onsite parking. This is important for the sustainability of the building because we wanted to discourage the occupants and users of our building from driving their car to and from work which is a major source of greenhouse gas pollution. We thought this was justified because of the fact that we have buses constantly running along New South Head Road and we are only 5 minutes walk from Edgecliff station, plus there’s plenty of public parking close by. Three years ago this was a big call – would we get the rents we needed to make the project financially viable without on site parking? Our options were not very good, the site is very tight and providing on site parking was going to be very difficult. After much soul searching, we decided not to provide any parking on site because we could not justify it commercially and we decided that not providing on site parking was consistent with the whole environmental rationale underpinning the project. Unfortunately this led to a dispute with council who wanted to charge a significant development levy for no onsite parking – however we managed to resolve our differences with Council amicably.

What were the things that didn’t work quite so well and how were they managed?

Section 94 development levies – originally Woollahra Council wanted to charge us a $1.3 million development levy for lack of on-site parking. To put this in perspective the cost for building was approximately $5 million, so it was a very significant tax. We lodged an appeal with the Land and Environment Court. Alan Jones found out what was going on and was very scathing of Council’s decision. In the end good sense won the day and we were able to settle out of court for what we thought was a fair figure and what I think the council thought was fair too.

Another regulatory issue happened at the start of our project when we’d already made our commitment to build a sustainable building. After we received approval from Woollahra Council for our building we went to Energy Australia and made an application to find out how much energy was available in Double Bay. We found out they wanted to put a substation on our site. The existing building had a 200 amp supply. We wanted to install a gas fire powered air conditioning system – the most efficient air conditioning system and we calculated that we only needed a 140 amp connection. Energy Australia didn’t believe us and forced us to provide an electricity substation on our site. The original scheme Energy Australia put to us was to locate the sub-station on the ground floor retail of our new building and that would have meant that we would lose about 1/3 of the ground floor or 150 m ² of prime retail space which would have meant the entire project was financially unviable. Fortunately we owned the property next door and we proposed that we locate the electricity sub-station next door which we owned. We still lost about 40m ² of prime retail space and conservatively I value this at $700,000. It’s very frustrating that there are no rights of appeal. The only avenue was to publicly shame Energy Australia.

The process we are going through now is also extremely difficult for our water systems. Our development application to Woollahra Council showed our water systems and we built according to these plans. It was only once it was built that Woollahra Council realised that we had not sought approval under Section 68 of the Local Government Act. We’re now going through a horrendous process to validate our systems. The good thing about this process is that we are fully accountable. It’s good for our tenants to know that Council and NSW Health are signing off on our systems. But it’s hugely time consuming and incredibly expense. To date we have spent $50,000 and expect to spend another $30,000 to get formal approvals. This is an incredibly expensive process given the water problems in Sydney. Our system has had teething problems but we are working through these in a systematic manner. The question I ask is: Given what we have gone through why would anyone ever again try to be self sufficient for water? We can’t blame NSW Health and Council, they’re just doing their job. But there’s no balancing of health and environmental issues because the law doesn’t allow this. Because no one has gone through this process before for a multi tenanted building. As a businessman – all of these expenses were unbudgeted – we had no idea that we were going to have to spend this money, which is really unfortunate. However, like every aspect of this project we will persevere and break through the red tape.

yourbuilding.org website 26 September 2007