One Sydney Harbour ‘Skyhomes’ Unveiled
Step inside Australia’s most expensive new project.
Step inside Australia’s most expensive new project.
The shimmering One Sydney Harbour development has today unveiled its latest ‘Skyhome’ penthouses.
The luxurious three-tower Lendlease project – designed by Pritzker award-winning architect Renzo Piano and which informs the city’s rapidly expanding Barangaroo precinct – is already home to the country’s most expensive residence, last year’s $140-million-plus sale of the premiere OSH penthouse not only smashing sales records but ultimately setting a new luxury agenda.
Now, two further penthouses – so-called Skyhomes – have hit the market, occupying the top two floors of the 68-storey Residences Two.
Spanning a full floor each and ranging from 540 to 670 square metres with 3-metre high ceilings throughout, each boasts private lift and rooftop terrace (80 – 100 sqm) with entertaining space, swimming pool and panoramic views across Sydney and its various architectural icons, as well as to the Blue Mountains in the west.
“All places have a story to tell, you just have to listen to that story and I think Sydney has a great story to tell,” offers Piano.“In this case, I think it’s very much about this, about making something that tells the essence of this city that is about sense of lightness, a sense of light, the sense of transparency.”
Skyhomes interiors will be crafted by leading designer Daniel Goldberg, founder and creative director of State of Craft, in consultation with the owners.
Goldberg previously collaborated with Piano on London’s The Shard and Shard Place in 2012.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
A new AI-driven account by leading landscape architect Jon Hazelwood pushes the boundaries on the role of ‘complex nature’ in the future of our cities
Drifts of ground cover plants and wildflowers along the steps of the Sydney Opera House, traffic obscured by meadow-like planting and kangaroos pausing on city streets.
This is the way our cities could be, as imagined by landscape architect Jon Hazelwood, principal at multi-disciplinary architectural firm Hassell. He has been exploring the possibilities of rewilding urban spaces using AI for his Instagram account, Naturopolis_ai with visually arresting outcomes.
“It took me a few weeks to get interesting results,” he said. “I really like the ephemeral nature of the images — you will never see it again and none of those plants are real.
“The AI engine makes an approximation of a grevillea.”
Hazelwood chose some of the most iconic locations in Australia, including the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, as well as international cities such as Paris and London, to demonstrate the impact of untamed green spaces on streetscapes, plazas and public space.
He said he hopes to provoke a conversation about the artificial separation between our cities and the broader environment, exploring ways to break down the barriers and promote biodiversity.
“A lot of the planning (for public spaces) is very limited,” Hazelwood said. “There are 110,000 species of plants in Australia and we probably use about 12 in our (public) planting schemes.
“Often it’s for practical reasons because they’re tough and drought tolerant — but it’s not the whole story.”
Hazelwood pointed to the work of UK landscape architect Prof Nigel Dunnett, who has championed wild garden design in urban spaces. He has drawn interest in recent years for his work transforming the brutalist apartment block at the Barbican in London into a meadow-like environment with diverse plantings of grasses and perennials.
Hazelwood said it is this kind of ‘complex nature’ that is required for cities to thrive into the future, but it can be hard to convince planners and developers of the benefits.
“We have been doing a lot of work on how we get complex nature because complexity of species drives biodiversity,” he said.
“But when we try to propose the space the questions are: how are we going to maintain it? Where is the lawn?
“A lot of our work is demonstrating you can get those things and still provide a complex environment.”
At the moment, Hassell together with the University of Melbourne is trialling options at the Hills Showground Metro Station in Sydney, where the remaining ground level planting has been replaced with more than 100 different species of plants and flowers to encourage diversity without the need for regular maintenance. But more needs to be done, Hazelwood said.
“It needs bottom-up change,” he said. ““There is work being done at government level around nature positive cities, but equally there needs to be changes in the range of plants that nurseries grow, and in the way our city landscapes are maintained and managed.”
And there’s no AI option for that.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’