Traders in Purple Break Ground on Lane Cove Anglican Apartments

Traders in Purple has broken ground on a $88-million, 48-home project at 2–10 Finlayson Street at Lane Cove , about 7.5km north-west of the Sydney CBD. The Finrose scheme, on land belonging to the Anglican St Andrew’s Church, will also include a 400-seat church hall and auditorium, a children’s creche and other community spaces, and retain the original 1924 heritage-listed church for adaptive reuse. Traders in Purple director Charles Daoud told The Urban Developer that “not many projects would look like this and have this very unique brief”. Earlier concept designs for the site involved a mixed-use tower with a church hall on the ground plane. However, Daoud said that Traders in Purple took a different approach. “You can’t have large spans on a ground floor and then hold up a building above without a lot of expense and engineering,” Daoud said. Daoud emphasised that the project team combined a development skillset with lived experience as members of faith communities, which informed the design. “If we’re building a brand new church, why do I want somebody to sit somewhere and all they can see is a structural column? ▲ The 48 market homes will join St Andrew’s church on Anglican land at Lane Cove. Placing the church hall to the side of the structure created a “very large, beautiful, contiguous space that genuinely is a church auditorium and performance space, no compromise”. “We’ve actually, acoustically and from a vibration point of view, separated it from the residents.” Feasibility for the project was also unique, Daoud said, with construction costs associated with ministry spaces reaching into “the tens of millions of dollars—and we have to pay for it in full entirely”. “There is no financial contribution at all from the church. The only thing they’re required to contribute is their land.” An additional single-home parcel neighbouring the site, of about 700sq m in size, was acquired in order to right-size the project to meet feasibility constraints, including meeting market demands for car parking spaces. Anglican Church expands property involvement While the Lane Cove scheme is the first in its class for the Anglican Church, others are already under way . Traders in Purple are also development partners on a mixed-use project at St Albans Church at 171 Great North Road, Five Dock . And in May, the $97-million, 186-home all-affordable tower at St Paul’s at Bankstown was approved. Sydney Anglican Property chief executive Ross Jones told The Urban Developer that St Andrew’s was a growing community and that the project was an upgrade rather than a divestment of unneeded land. ▲ The project has street frontage on Rosenthal Avenue and faces retail centre The Canopy. “A good proportion of our parishes are growing in number, or growing in attendance, and so we need to provide fit for purpose facilities for them,” Jones said. “And it just so happens that in some of our locations, like this one, we can use the airspace above to fund the expense of building new facilities for the church. “We’ve got a fairly ambitious program to keep up with our growth projections, and we’ve got to build 30 new churches in the next 30 years, and that’s additional to ones like this that are going to be expanded to increase their current capacity.” Greenfield churches are partly funded by subdivision on excess land surrounding them. Meanwhile, SAP is developing a series of regional building and property plans for the Sydney basin and is looking to build relationships with a small group of trusted development partners. ▲ The church and worship spaces will have a separate entrance to the residential component. “A lot of developers and constructors don’t quite understand what modern church is like, so they’ve got the idea that you’ve got to build a big barn,” Jones said. “They don’t see that that’s not what modern church is like anymore.” Sustainable Development Group managing director Richard Ollerhead, who has acted as a development advisor to SAP, told The Urban Developer that faith communities were looking to retain places of worship while divesting components of land. “Many institutions have got some good amount of stock in certain locations … but they’re never going to use their air rights themselves. “We’re very interested in unlocking potential generally … to work developing at the portfolio level.”

Apartments
Patrick Lau
Wed 26 Aug 26

Traders in Purple Break Ground on Lane Cove Anglican Apartments

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