The award-winning development changing the way design is done in Sydney

I t’s 6pm on a weeknight and already, basement bar Apollonia on Young Street is full. Earlier in the day, queues snake along Loftus Lane as customers wait their turn to order lunch at Marrickville Pork Roll. It’s the same story at nearby Hinchcliff House, where it can take weeks to book a table at the busy restaurant.

While Quay Quarter Laneways at Sydney’s Circular Quay has picked up a number of awards, including the Lord Mayor’s Prize for Architecture and the Urban Design Award, it is perhaps the locals who offer the best measure of its success. For architect Shaun Carter, director of CarterWilliamson, it’s a delight to see so many people engaging with this part of the city.

“Before we started working on the laneway, it was scary,” he says. 

Made up of five buildings – two existing heritage buildings and three new – Quay Quarter Lanes, tucked in behind the historic Customs House is the result of an eight-year process involving five architectural studios. While Loftus Lane is the main through way for visitors, 9 Young Street by Studio Bright, 15 and 11 Young Street by SJB and 18 Loftus Street by Silvester Fuller are home to several floors of apartments, as well as roof gardens and terraces, balancing privacy with world class views of Circular Quay. Two of the new buildings will also have office, retail and hospitality spaces.

Hinchciff House, one of only two surviving woolstores at Circular Quay, became the focus for the studio of CarterWilliamson while Lippmann Partnership took on Gallipoli Memorial Club. 

Engaging five leading (but not large) Sydney architecture studios to collaborate on Quay Quarter Lanes, rather than one firm, is a marked departure from the way redevelopment has been done in Sydney. ASPECT Studios took responsibility for the landscape and urban design for both Quay Quarter Lanes and the adjacent Quay Quarter Tower. 

Co-ordinating architect and SJB director Adam Haddow says bringing in five studios to work across the 2,200sqm site allowed for greater attention to be given to even the smallest aspects of each building.

“The best architecture is about smallness and specificity,” Haddow says. “Each building had its own site foreman and architect leading it. When you can form a team of diverse thinkers who can work those issues out between boundaries, you get great results.”

Although the buildings are quite different, the expectation was that they would make room for each other to be their best selves. This required a lot of conversations between architectural practices.

“It was a bit like herding cats,” Haddow admits. “But if you leave a project in one set of hands, no matter how good those hands are, they are spread thinly. If you can get many hands doing small things there is ‘bigness’.” 

Carter says the collective met on site on a weekly basis to discuss progress of their work and how it would relate to the other buildings.

“It was like State of Origin where you have all the best players on the one team and they all had to play their part in the retelling of a Sydney block. But it only works if you have great players on the team,” Carter says. 

“We met every Thursday and everyone would be tired because of the level of commitment -which was outstanding – but it meant often we weren’t getting enough sleep.”

Drawing on the history of the site, the palette is varied and yet sympathetic, leaning into the texture and warmth of brick for the new buildings and reviving the beauty of the original sandstone for the existing buildings.

In some parts, new brickwork curves upwards, like it has been peeled back from the building. Other parts have arched ceilings finished in finely worked plaster.

“When we started having conversations we had six teams working on how to define ‘place’,” Haddow says. “ASPECT found references to the ‘pleasure grounds’ that they created near Customs House in the early 1800s where people used to come together.”

Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones was selected to design a number of artworks that have been integrated into the site, from ‘oyster shells’ embedded into mortar lines as a reference to Indigenous middens once found on this site, to ‘fish scales’ using green marble from the demolished lobby of 50 Bridge Street. 

“There was a strong narrative of people coming together on the site,” says Haddow. 

Tucked in behind the heritage protected Customs House, the development also needed to take site lines to Circular Quay and the harbour into account. Once again, the coordinated collaboration paid dividends.

“All the buildings look down on Customs House,” he says. “Ours was the tallest building at the back so we consolidated the aircon plant so that not every building has to have that ugly service part to it. All the rubbish is also collected in one spot.”

For Haddow, it’s also the rubbish that has been his measure of the success of this project.

“When people really live somewhere, they take care of it and look after it,” he says. “I noticed one evening that there was a guy walking along picking up rubbish and I thought ‘you live here’.”

Lucky guy.

See more stories like this in the first issue of Kanebridge Quarterly magazine here.