Lendlease Completes 15-Year Barangaroo South Rebirth

The 15-year redevelopment of the landmark Barangaroo South precinct by Lendlease has completed. 

One of Australia’s largest redevelopment projects, Lendlease was awarded the contract in 2009, and work on the regeneration of Sydney’s Harbourfront began in 2011. 

The total cost of the project has been reported as around $6 billion.

Barangaroo South is one of a trio of redevelopment areas that also includes the completed Headland Park and Barangaroo Central. The latter is being delivered by developer Aqualand.

Barangaroo South has been a project of major milestones, not just for Lendlease, but for Sydney itself. 

The 7.5ha site of the redevelopment includes the International Towers Sydney, a trio of offices with about 300,000sq m of space, as well as Daramu House and International House. 

The latter two office blocks were designed by Tzannes and completed in 2019. They are acknowledged as the first cross-laminated timber commercial buildings in Sydney.

▲ International Towers Sydney offers about 300,000sq m of space.

Tenants for the new office towers include KPMG, PwC and Westpac. 

The Barangaroo South site on the western edge of Sydney’s CBD was formerly a container port. It is now home to more than 1800 residents across a number of residential developments. 

That includes One Sydney Harbour of more than 800 apartments. Its three luxury residential towers were designed by Renzo Piano and have secured more than $4 billion in sales since its 2019 launch. 

Notably, the three-level penthouse that tops one of the towers—Residences One—sold for more than $141 million in 2019, the most expensive individual residential property sale in Australia.

The commercial elements of Barangaroo South consist of 95 retailers and employ 23,000 workers. 

▲ View from an apartment in One Sydney Harbour at Barangaroo South.

Lendlease said the project was an “international benchmark for large-scale urban regeneration”.

The final Central section of the wider Barangaroo development is progressing and construction on the foreshore apartment towers and commercial and retail elements are expected to start before the end of the year after the Aqualand’s project won approval in February.

Barangaroo Central will deliver 75,000sq m of residential space, a 16,000sq m hotel and 50 retail tenancies, all centred around a mammoth public park. It is due to complete in 2030.

On the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the site was first developed as wharves in the 1820s. 

▲ Aerial image of Barangaroo South after the site was cleared.

By the 1960s it was Sydney’s primary container port and described as “a vast featureless concrete apron”. By the early 2000s, it became unsuited to modern cargo vessels and in 2003, the NSW government declared the wharves defunct and moved activities to Port Botany. 

The area was renamed for a First Nations historical figure, the Cammeraygal woman Barangaroo, a pivotal figure in meetings between British colonists and Aboriginal traditional custodians of the area in the 1790s.

Lendlease chief executive Tony Lombardo said that the precinct had “changed the face of Sydney’s waterfront, established new benchmarks for sustainable development, and provided a model for urban regeneration that continues to inform our approach to creating places that deliver long-lasting value”.

Lendlease development chief executive Tom Mackellar said that it had reconnected the city to its Harbour “in a way that seemed unimaginable 15 years ago”.