‘Sibling’ Perth Girls School Towers PBSA Switch Endorsed

Plans to convert a two-tower apartment approval into two “sibling” PBSA towers on the hilltop heritage site of the former Perth Girls School have been endorsed by the WA capital’s chief planner.

In a report to WA’s metro inner development assessment panel, City of Perth planning and sustainability general manager Maria Cooke has recommended approval of the $110-million project when the panel meets on April 8.

Proposed by Perth-based Australian Development Capital, both of the proposed towers would rise to 26 storeys on an East Perth hill that slopes up from the Swan River-side WACA ground and the Gloucester Park trots track.

ADC executive director Rod Hamersley told The Urban Developer the revised plans were for Stage 1 of the project to be built at 2 Wellington Street.

An approval granted in June 2022 for ADC to develop Stage 1 as two 25-storey apartment towers and Stage Two on an adjacent block as a 37-storey apartment tower and 15-storey build-to-rent tower did not proceed.

Those plans included adaptive reuse of the Art Deco state-heritage-listed Perth Girls School building to include a microbrewery, art gallery and yoga studio, among other uses.

Hamersley said the formerly proposed wholesale brewing operation would be scaled back to a brew-pub, the reduced size of which would enable ADC to retain several trees lost under the original plans.

“We’ll still have some of the amenity elements that we had previously, which was a brewery and an anchor restaurant and some ancilliary retail in terms of coffee shop ... but a large majority of the heritage building will be dedicated to student use such as break-out facilities and some office use,” he said of the 1936-built structure.

“We’ll have a commercial gym in there that will be dedicated to students as well as the public, so there’s some public interface there.

“The idea is that the heritage building gets repositioned and a lot of the amenity for the precinct gets programmed into that building.”

▲ Rod Hamersley said most of the project’s amenity aspects would be housed in the 1936-built Perth Girls School building. Image: Chris Thomson

He said the education-aligned thematic link to the former school was a “positive and makes a lot of sense”  from a heritage perspective.

“We’ll obviously do a lot of interpretation and story-telling around the site to make sure everybody understands that previous use was significant,” Hamersley said.

“It’s a fairly significant site that we felt was pretty integral to the regeneration of the East Perth area [that has] lacked some amenity for some time and we’re trying to plug in some of the uses that not only the students can use but also the wider community.”

Hamersley said the nearby redevelopment of the WACA and the impending build of East Perth Primary School across the street from his project would “get woven into what now is a very desireable place to live for all demographics from family through to students”.

He said the previous approval for Stage 2 “still sits there live” and the 37-storey height would probably come down but the bulk and scale would be similar. He said the amended Stage 2 would “be going up for approval shortly” in the form of a variation application.

The two freshly-applied-for towers would instead contain 1196 student accommodation beds. Retail, food and beverage, cultural and entertainment uses would be included at ground level across the precinct-sized 11,166sq m site.

The planned PBSA buildings are similar in layout but project architect MJA Studio stresses they are “sibling” rather than “twin” towers.  Each tower would house 598 student beds in a mix of studio, two-bed multi-share and four-bed multi-share units.

The project would have eight parking bays to serve the commercial tenancies, and 192 bicycle bays for residents, commercial tenants and visitors.