Tall & Urban News

Melbourne Developer’s Brisbane Skyscraper Gets Green Light

Melbourne. CC-BY-SA
Melbourne. CC-BY-SA
30 June 2022 | Brisbane, Australia

A private Melbourne-based developer has received planning approval to build an energy-efficient A-Grade office tower above a 150-year-old synagogue at 25 Mary Street in Brisbane’s CBD. The developer will knock down a hall owned by the Brisbane Hebrew Congregation, as well as its own commercial spaces, to create a 2700sq m site and build a 200-meter-high tower. The Urban Developer reported in January that the developer had been in talks with the congregation for more than a year before finalizing the deal.

The new building, designed by BVN, will have 46 stories of ventilated floor plates, a level dedicated to wellness and landscaped terraces as well as a ground plane with new facilities for the congregation and an activated cross-block link. It will also be topped with a distinctive building crown, dubbed “the lantern”, with two penthouse apartments on levels 44 and 45. The state-heritage-listed synagogue will not be changed aside from minor alterations to make room for the pedestrian accessway linking Mary and Margaret streets.

The development is being overseen by Mary Street Holdings Unit Trust and Bellevue Terrace Properties Unit Trust, which is headed up by John Kaias of JJK Properties. Kaias is the director of the family-owned Abcor Proprietary Limited, a Melbourne based engineering company which has had a run of developments in Brisbane.

The commercial tower is the developer’s second project in Brisbane, the other is a boutique apartment development at 25 Harcourt Street in New Farm that will see two early 1960s apartment blocks demolished and replaced by five apartments.

For more on this story, go to The Urban Developer.