Lendlease adds to the wood pile in Barangaroo
Lendlease has won planning approval for its second timber tower in Sydney’s Barangaroo South as the diversified property giant consolidates its role as a leading player using innovative wood product for commercial construction.
The new tower, a sister to International House completed last year, will comprise 10,000 square metres of office space over six floors above ground-floor retail.
The building will be known as Daramu House, which means “tree house” in the local Aboriginal language known commonly as the Sydney Language and also as Dharug and Eora.
It will be built from cross-laminated timber, or CLT – an innovative panel-style product that can significantly cut construction costs – and glue-laminated timber, or Glulam.
Designed by the practice of celebrated Australian architect Alec Tzannes, the tower will also include roof-top planting to capture rain, and solar photo-voltaic cells to generate power for the building and the precinct.
It is Lendlease’s sixth engineered timber building in Australia, and the third to have come out of the company’s pre-fabricated building material factory at Eastern Creek in Sydney’s west.
The listed property player, which combines development, construction and investment management across a global platform, declined to indicate what the tower’s potential end value could be – nor who will be its ultimate owner – but market sources expect its value, when fully leased, to be north of $200 million.
“Daramu House will provide tenants with health and wellbeing benefits combined with a warm, clean and natural environment,” said Rob Deck, managing director at Barangaroo South.
Fronting Hickson Road, the new building is due to be completed in late 2019, adding to a growing portfolio of timber buildings which began with a 10-storey apartment tower in Melbourne’s Docklands five years ago.
It has also constructed the Library at The Dock in Melbourne’s Docklands and the Jordan Springs Community Hub in western Sydney from timber material.
But Lendlease’s most ambitious effort so far is a $140 million, nine-storey building rising fast in Brisbane’s RNA Showgrounds redevelopment and due to be completed in October.
The Brisbane tower, which is funded by the Liberman family-backed Impact Investment Group, will be the largest and tallest engineered timber office building in the world based on gross floor area.
