A riverfront site in Melbourne's Southbank has come unstuck after 15 years. Total project value A$1.5 billion, approved at 67 storeys. The heritage pub whose listing the then owner fought six years ago will not be demolished. It becomes the front door.
1.In August the Victorian planning minister approved a mixed-use building at 1-29 Queens Bridge Street, Southbank, Melbourne. Site area 5,059 sqm, 67 storeys approved, A$1.5 billion in total project value. Design by Cox Architecture with ODO, developed by PDG. The land sits on the south bank of the Yarra River, right beside the casino complex.
2.What stands there now is four empty shops of two storeys or less and one pub. That pub, built in 1926, becomes the front door of the project. A site in the middle of a river city where nothing has gone up for more than 15 years.
3.The tower is pleated six times, vertically. The design team traces this to the movement of the river, but the visible effect lies elsewhere. A mass that would otherwise read as one broad slab is split into six narrow faces, so from across the water it stands as a bundle rather than a block.
4.The podium stacks ten levels. Parking for 518 cars and the resident amenity go here, with lounges, coworking, a library, an indoor lap pool and a gym spread across floors. A new 527 sqm laneway cut through from Queens Bridge Street to Freshwater Place, lined with food and drink. The most striking move on the plans.
5.The pub is a white wall. Vertical grooves are cut into it to read as pilasters, and the name is carved into the upper corner. The ground floor awning reaches the full width of the footpath, with tables beneath it. Planters run along the roof parapet, holding the two levels of new glass above at a distance. Without that band the old building would read as a plinth for the new one.
6.The land changed hands in December 2024. The developer bought it from Blackstone for A$85 million, or A$16,801 per square metre. That is roughly KRW 52 million per pyeong, the 3.3 sqm unit Korean buyers price land in, at A$1 to KRW 940. Blackstone had picked the site up in 2022 when it bought the casino operator outright for A$8.9 billion.
7.A$85 million is 5.7 per cent of the A$1.5 billion. Divide it by dwellings and the land cost per apartment is A$140,000, around KRW 136 million. There is only one reason a riverfront address in the middle of the city produces a number like that: 67 storeys share the ground.
8.Housing is not all that goes in. The scheme lodged for public notice in March put 637 apartments, a 181-key hotel, 2,762 sqm of office and 1,741 sqm of retail into 71 levels. Most of the apartments are one-bedroom, 192 of them, and two-bedroom, 302; there are 14 four-bedroom units and five penthouses. The announcement after the August approval speaks of 67 storeys and 588 apartments.
9.Two numbers circulate around this project. The March lodgement carried A$450 million; the August announcement says A$1.5 billion. The first is what it costs to build, the second what it is worth once built and sold, or so the industry reads them. The A$1.05 billion between them covers the land, the finance and the developer's margin.
10.What the food and drink at the base does for this project is not rental income. The laneway at 527 sqm and the seats in and around the pub all sit inside 1,741 sqm of retail, and that floor area cannot move the feasibility of a A$1.5 billion scheme. What the podium does instead is hold up the sale price of 588 apartments. Whether you can walk in off the promenade separates the price of two identical apartments on the same floor with the same aspect.
11.The claim that heritage listing blocks development was made on this very site six years ago. In September 2020 an expert appearing for the casino operator told a planning panel that a heritage overlay on the pub would compromise legitimate development opportunity and reduce the benefit the area would receive. The panel found the other way. The net community benefit of the objectives set in the Act and in heritage policy outweighed any individual consideration.
12.Six years on, this is the answer. Rather than knock the pub down, the scheme brings people in through it, sets a large atrium behind it and lifts a bar onto the roof looking over the promenade. A control imposed to protect the building has become the start of the circulation. What planning panels actually argue over is not the top of a tower but the height a person walks at.
13.Australia's tallest building was once meant to stand here. The scheme approved in February 2017 was 323 metres and 90 storeys, with a 388-key hotel, 708 apartments and a A$100 million community benefit package. The designer was picked through an international competition and the casino operator partnered with a builder. That permit simply expired in 2019.
14.The building called heritage is in fact hollow. It opened in the 1880s as the Falls Bridge Hotel and was rebuilt in 1926 at a cost of 17,000 pounds. When it became a nightclub in the 1990s a A$12 million refit stripped the interior out entirely. So what the overlay protects is a shell. That shell, named in 2020 as the thing blocking development, is now the sign above the front door.
15.A riverfront site of 5,059 sqm, empty for 15 years, sold for A$85 million, won approval as a A$1.5 billion scheme and went to demolition and early works in April. What changed in between is not the storey count or the unit mix but the attitude taken to a 1926 building. Doing the same thing in Korea catches here. A scheme that carries a registered or locally listed building through picks up extra rounds of review, and finance costs accrue over those months, yet few developers put those months into the feasibility in advance. Keeping a shell shows up as time before it shows up as construction cost.