[+] Raising the Bars: Hard Labour Pays Off for Pentridge Hotel Conversion

It took prison labour just two years to build the notorious HM Prison Pentridge. It’s taken architects, developers, builders, designers, engineers, a host of trades people and all the know-how of the 21st century, 10 years to redevelop the 6.7ha that make up what was once the country’s most feared correctional facility. And they’ve still not finished. But in that decade Melbourne’s 170-year-old bluestone prison has been carefully and painstakingly converted to a $1-billion entertainment and lifestyle precinct, 20 minutes north of the city centre. The 6m-high walls—once home to a who’s who of Australia’s criminal world—now house a shopping mall, 15-screen cinema, a craft brewery, wine bar, restaurant, an apartment tower, townhouses and the 106-key Adina apartment hotel. But it’s the most recent addition behind the 6km of 60cm-thick walls that would leave the likes of bushranger Ned Kelly, murderer Ronald Joseph Ryan and armed robber Mark ‘Chopper’ Read wondering. All three were at different times guests of Pentridge’s B-Division, which last month was officially opened as The Interlude, a 19-room wellness retreat. Like the Adina, it’s part of the Australian-based TFE Hotels group. The adaptive reuse of old prisons is not new—there are about 40 worldwide, including three in Australia—but this latest one is unique, if for no other reason than the lengths to which developers have gone. And the reverse-engineering required to get them there. Those 19 hotel suites that make up The Interlude have been created by knocking through the bluestone walls to link four, sometimes five, cells together. It took developers nine months to adapt a single suite. Airconditioning is under the beds instead of in the ceilings. It was considered easier than trying to tunnel through the rocks in the roof—put there to prevent inmates escaping. The 10cm-thick wooden cell doors are all original, locally made and carefully restored, although the steel plating and fixtures were all brought from England when the prison was first built in 1851. There was no smelting in Australia then. ▲ Four and five prison cells were joined to make guest rooms for the hotel. The floor of what is now the guest wing was taken up, huge stones were individually marked before hotel’s services laid down. The floor was made level and the stones relaid. “Yes, the entirety of the B-Division floor had to be removed,” TFE’s general manager at Pentridge, Jesse Kornoff, says. “From a services perspective—plumbing, fire, stormwater, sewer—all needed to be put in. From an accessibility perspective, the floor needed to be levelled, doorway widths … all those sorts of things needed to be considered,” he says. “So, it’s been quite a significant project, to number all of those floor tiles, to remove them safely and then reinstall them again.” Today those heavy stone floors are also heated for guests who are paying upwards of $730 a night to live the Pentridge experience. It took the restoration team another three months to dig through solid bluestone and basalt to create the hotel’s favourite feature—a subterranean swimming pool. Again, the floor was taken up, boulders marked and removed by conveyer belt to protect the adjacent prison walls. “The main challenge was that when you’re digging a hole next to these walls, the walls don’t collapse,” says Konzepte architecture and design partner Craig McLeod. ▲ A table capable of seating 100 diners has been set up in the 40m-long former prison wing. “The pool is actually very close to the structural wall, so you got all these loads coming down diagonally to roughly a half metre below the top of the pool.” There are no blueprints for Pentridge Prison, and that led to a “squillion” challenges, according to McLeod. All of them interesting and a lot completely unexpected. The prison annex, which held a mess hall in its day and now still houses a restaurant, had to be torn down and then rebuilt. “Half of it had to come down anyway because that sits above what is now the basement,” McLeod says. “But in the end, it was our recommendation to pull the whole thing down and start again. “It just made it structurally easier, which itself was an exercise, to be able to reposition all the building elements as they were originally.” But the biggest surprise for McLeod were those famous bluestone walls. ▲ Hotel managers say it is difficult to get a Friday night reservation in the wine bar, created in part from former prison cells in B-Division. “None of these walls is on big concrete footings,” he says. “They’re on crushed rock beds, if you like. And the fact that it has stayed stable is quite amazing. “So all credit to the builder because there has literally been no movement. And let’s say it’s also a credit to all the prisoners way back when they built the wall.” During the project the architect discovered the bluestone was mined and cut from a quarry across the road. Nearby Merri Creek was a bluestone quarry. “The prisoners had to mine it, cut it and cart it to the site. And these are big bluestone blocks. It’d be an interesting exercise to understand how they did it. “And just knowing now that all the fabric that exists in prison is literally local products, local material. It’s quite incredible.” The National Trust of Australia, which is responsible for tourism on the site, says Pentridge Prison—once the biggest and most-used prison complex built in Victoria—replaced Melbourne Gaol as the main remand and reception centre in 1924. It was eventually downgraded and finally closed in 1997. ▲ The centrepiece of the redevelopment is the subterranean pool. It took months of painstaking work to create the hole in the prison floor. Shayher Group, part of the giant Taiwanese apartment developer Par Jar Group, acquired the derelict northern half of the prison in 2013. Three years later it signed a management agreement with TFE Hotels. Under the contract TFE is running multiple brands. Much of the Adina’s early business has targeted so-called destination events and conferencing. Its biggest event space is the prison’s 170-year-old chapel, a pillarless room with a 10m-high peaked ceiling and arched windows. A half a dozen of the tiny cells now make up part of the Olivine wine bar, while a 40m-long section of the original prison wing houses a single table capable of seating 100. Outside the bar is one of the surprising archaeological finds made during the early works on the redevelopment; three rare panopticons—cartwheel-like shapes that are all that remains of what were known as airing yards built in the 1850s. The circular design, with walls coming out from the centre, created wedge-shaped exercise yards where prisoners would be allowed access for an hour each day, without contact. Eight are known to exist in the world. The Pentridge redevelopment has kept one of them. And nearby, on one of the dark and sombre stone walls, a large white X has been painted. It marks the spot where on December 19 in 1965 Ronald Ryan and Peter Walker climbed the wall, ran across the top to a tower and forced the guard to open a door. As he ran across what is now Pentridge Boulevard, Ryan shot dead warder George Hodson, a crime for which he was later hanged in what was the last legal execution in Australia. “What we’ve redeveloped and what we’ve done here is a pretty extraordinary story of adaptive reuse,” says TFE’s Kornoff. “For 170 years everybody did everything they possibly could to get out of here, and never to return. “We have wanted to develop a destination that they were actually going to pay a lot of money to come in to stay.” You are currently experiencing The Urban Developer Plus (TUD+), our premium membership for property professionals. Click here to learn more.

[+] Raising the Bars: Hard Labour Pays Off for Pentridge Hotel Conversion

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