Retail and Office space with Collins Street frontage
This project provides the opportunity to insert a new façade into Melbourne’s most intact historic streetscape and provide a new image for the Grand Hyatt Hotel. The result is a striking modern insertion which responds to the scale and texture of the historic surroundings to sit comfortably in its context.
Located in the ‘Paris end’ of Collins Street, the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Melbourne was originally developed in the mid 1980s at a time when uncertainty in architectural style resulted in buildings dressed in conservative post-modern façades. The Hotel consists of a 23 storey tower over podiums that front Collins and Russell Streets. The podium that fronts Collins Street contained shops and a food court with a restaurant and conference rooms above, all arranged around a vast atrium.
This project is concerned with the redevelopment of the podium that fronts Collins Street and will provide high quality retail space with new office space above. Several elements contribute to the quality of the existing fabric of Collins Street including a legible parapet height, a variable rhythm of columns, cornices and windows and the richly detailed shopfronts and entrances. The new façade to the Hyatt responds directly to these elements with a two storey shopfront of columns, projecting windows and canopies creating fine grain and detail addressing the street, with a two storey grided screen of perforated metal and glass panels above, giving a civic scale and texture to the elevation. A gold coloured floating parapet crowns the composition while referencing the colour of the inserted gold canopies below.
Above the existing podium three new floors of office space have been added, set back from the street façade to maintain the historic scale of the streetscape. The leaning, facetted face of the office floors further distances these floors from the street in visual terms.
Internally the atrium has been reduced in size and the retailing reconfigured to create a new laneway style route through the building to the hotel lobby and Russell Street. Acknowledging its prime retail location on Collins Street, many of the new units are directly entered from the street, reversing the previous internalised layout.
