Hotel & HospitalityChris ThomsonMon 19 Oct 26
WA Planners Clear Spud King’s Pub Proposal for Rockingham Suburb
A $3-million hotel planned by Western Australia’s “Spud King” beside one of his 21 grocery outlets has been approved for a southern Perth municipality readying for an AUKUS-induced development boom.
In July, The Urban Developer revealed that the Galati Group—founded and co-directed by fruit and vegetable retailer Tony Galati—had filed plans for the hotel with the City of Rockingham.
A decade ago, WA’s best-known greengrocer and vegetable grower fought an edict by the state’s now-defunct potato marketing corporation to stop planting more than his allotted quota of potatoes, and won.
From Broome south to Busselton and Exmouth east to Eucla, sandgropers now know the progenitor of the 21-store Spudshed dominion simply as The Spud King.
Unanimously approved at a meeting of WA’s metro outer development assessment panel, his 1467sq m hotel in the Rockingham suburb of Baldivis is slated to comprise a bar, beer garden, restaurant, kitchen, function room and TAB.
To rise at 124 Kerosene Lane, a vacant part of a larger plot known to Rockingham planning officials as the Spudshed group centre, the pub wil have a beer garden, smoking area, playground and delivery yard.
The hotel will be next door to the Galati Group’s imposing 24/7 steel Spudshed at Baldivis, the suburb where the first, more rustic, Spudshed started trading in 1998.
According to documents filed by the Galati Group, the hotel, designed by Perth-based Olk and Associates Architects, will “complete” the group centre and boost some of its “underperforming” businesses.
“While Spudshed functions as a strong anchor, underperforming tenancies and surrounding vacant sites have limited the development of an active main street,” the documents said.
“The proposed tavern is expected to catalyse the centre by introducing a complementary social and hospitality use that enhances activation, community focus and overall amenity.”
At the panel meeting, Planning Solutions senior planner Alexia Yacoubian, who appeared for the Galati Group, said the hotel would be a “focal point for socialising, dining and entertaining to ... the established and emerging community ... in the immediate precinct and surrounding suburbs”.
Rockingham mayor Lorna Buchan moved that the hotel be approved. She congratulated Galati Group, Planning Solutions and City staff on working together to resolving the project’s approval conditions.
Unanimous support, no objections
According to renderings of the approved hotel, its name, at least at present, is The Last Local. There is another Last Local at Canning Vale in Perth’s eastern suburbs.
In line with the unanimous approval of the panel, six public submissions had been received on the pub project with none objecting.
The WA government anticipates that federal funding for infrastructure to help house and maintain nuclear submarines at Rockingham’s Garden Island and the nearby Australian Marine Complex under the AUKUS defence pact will create 10,000 direct jobs in the area during the next 20 years.
Anticipating that growth, Defence Housing Australia is partnering with Parcel, Forma and Plunkett to build 550 homes in the area for military personnel. DHA is also moving to snap up homes in the area.
Meanwhile, expressions of interest closed in July for a WA government process seeking to develop 18ha of land at Rockingham’s town centre for housing. For that land, H-U and Built Development Group had earlier proposed homes, which the state determined to have a reasonable prospect of meeting its criteria but did not justify further engagement.
The Galati Group was contacted for comment for this story. The group’s 22nd Spudshed is due to open next month at WA’s southernmost settlement of Albany.
