Brown Property Group turn their hand to apartments
One of Hawthorn's more recent proposed developments has come from an unlikely source.
Although headquartered in the same vicinity as the application, Brown Property Group has to date focused primarily on detached residential estates on the periphery of Melbourne’s South East. Diverging away from their typical modus operandi, Brown Property Group are behind a bid to redevelop a corner block at 2-4 Roche Street.
With the initial bid for the site's redevelopment running into a planning stumbling block, DKO Architecture was enlisted along with what amounted to a new project team to provide a new design outcome.
The initial submission seeking 54 apartments has now been redesigned to include 33 apartments, equating to a reduction of 40%. This was a direct result of the introduction of the State Government’s Better Apartment Design Standards 2017.
Consequently, 2-4 Roche Street's 33 apartments sit within a 6-story building above 2 levels of basement parking.
DKO Architecture has gone with a brick exterior injected with hanging greenery, with the bulk of the building seemingly set back from the perimeter. Bronze balustrades, frames and planter boxes, plus exposed horizontal concrete bands round out the project's exterior look.
Akin to many other apartment projects currently slated for Hawthorn, 2-4 Roche Street is heavily skewed toward two and particularly three bedroom apartments.
Brown Property Group picked up the site for $9 million during mid 2017, when the 1,209 square metre site was offered by Savills for sale.
The addition of 2-4 Roche Street to the Urban Project Database sees the number of active Hawthorn residential projects with 10 or more dwellings increase to 28. Of these 8 are at registrations and sales with JD Group's Sierra Hawthorn the largest; it contains 293 dwellings.
Furthermore, Queens Avenue, Manningtree, Longhouse, Hawthorn Club and Hawthorn Bond are at construction, amounting to a further approximately 330 new dwellings for the popular suburb.