Bhart Bhushan’s Bathla Group has filed plans for four, four-storey apartment buildings in the western Sydney suburb of Austral.

The prolific Sydney developer is seeking a mix of 96 one, two, three and four-bedroom apartments, with two basement levels of parking.

The site at 420 Fifteenth Avenue is about 1.218ha, however, Liverpool City Council is currently assessing an earlier application which would allow the developer to subdivide the property, creating two so-called super lots, one of 4040sq m and the other of 4740 square metres.

Ten of the proposed apartments will be adaptable, while at least 40 will be provided as two-storey townhouses.

The site currently includes a two-storey brick residence and single storey weatherboard structure. Both will be demolished.

Planning Ingenuity, which lodged the documents on behalf of Bathla, said the development would include basement parking for 182 vehicles.  About 1320sq m, or 15 per cent of the site, will be given over to communal open space. Construction costs are expected to be about $22 million.

The application has been slow in coming to fruition. 

Planning Ingenuity said pre-application meetings were held with Liverpool as early as October of 2021, during which the council suggested the development’s density was very high “and not what is expected in the precinct planning for a development that is mapped as an R3 Medium Density Zone.”

Bathla responded, saying: “The proposal seeks to provide a density of 78 dwellings per hectare, when calculating based on the overall allotment identified as Lot 416 in DP 2475. This is considered to be acceptable given the superior location of the site...”

▲ Bathla’s plans call for 96 apartments in four buildings, each of them four storeys high.

The GCCV Architect’s plans show the four buildings have a maximum height of 13.25m—1.25m higher than the maximum permitted building height.

In a Clause Four Variation request, Planning Ingenuity said that given the considerable setback and centralised location of these elements, it would not form part of the dominant visual building composition from the street frontages.

“Further, given the site contains multiple street frontages, the non-compliances (height) will not be readily apparent as the established envelope is consistent with the development standard,” the planner said in documents found via BCI Central.

Bathla, a family-owned business established in New South Wales in 1997, has mainly focused on western Sydney.

But in December of 2021 it made its first major interstate acquisition, buying the Clyde town centre development site in Melbourne’s outer south-east for a reported $67.65 million.

Most recently it filed plans for 178 apartments in four buildings at Box Hill, in the same street as another application on which it is still awaiting a decision. The new filing seeks four residential flat buildings, each of up to six storeys at 6 Alan Street, at Box Hill, about 45km north-west of Sydney CBD.