When architect Callum Fraser looks at the Gold Coast skyline, what he sees is far from a conventional city.

“I like to joke it’s the architectural version of the bar scene from Star Wars, where everybody’s trying to be unique and different in a more extroverted way,” he says.

It’s an image that perfectly captures the city’s riot of forms, styles and ambitions, all jostling for attention.

One that even—as one of Australia’s leading highrise architects—Fraser’s own eloquent lexicon of design superlatives couldn’t conjure any better.

Albeit, the Mos Eisley Cantina he is referring to from the 1970s sci-fi blockbuster being what Jedi master Obi-Wan Kenobi cautions is a “wretched hive of scum and villainy”.

But don’t take the Fraser & Partners founder the wrong way—his tongue-in-cheek comparison is meant in a complimentary, not a derogatory sense.

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“The Gold Coast is an extraordinary bloom of idiosyncrasies,” he says. “There’s a place here for everyone… and I think that’s very attractive.

“There’s also this kind of collective will here, if I can put it that way.

“It’s a hard thing to describe but it’s a very dynamic community and I think that really stands out to have the confidence to kind of let each other do crazy things and support each other in their ambitions.”

And the Melbourne-based architect, who travels weekly to the coastal strip, concedes it is a place where he also has been “trying to stand out a little bit again” amid the architectural cacophony.

“The challenge for me, when you look at the Gold Coast skyline, is to do something quite calm and deliberate,” he says.

As well as leading the design vision for the lauded Mondrian Gold Coast hotel, which swung open its doors last year, he has been collaborating with the Makris family—the owners of Marina Mirage—to reimagine what is one of the city’s original and most recognisable luxury property assets.

Adorned with white sails, the waterfront retail destination was developed by entrepreneur Christopher Skase in the 1980s largely to serve the well-heeled guests of his Sheraton Mirage Resort across the road.

It set a new benchmark for high-end shopping and dining with its shopfronts occupied by brands such as Gucci and Louis Vuitton.

Almost 40 years later, Fraser says the mixed-use, $500 million redevelopment of the landmark property marks another pivotal moment in the city’s evolution.

Positioned as the centrepiece of a $2-billion-plus transformation of The Spit, its makeover is being anchored with an “Australian Riviera” identity.

▲ Callum Fraser, the lead architect behind the design for the $500-million Marina Mirage redevelopment.

“This is Australia’s new front door to luxury,” Fraser declares from the top deck of a superyacht soiree celebrating the project’s launch—as it makes it way down the Broadwater and the 5km-long isthmus stretching north from Surfers Paradise slips slowly by.

“The thing that’s been evolving on the Gold Coast for the last 7 to 10 years is a profoundly luxury brand.

“And there are now a series of apartment buildings all the way up from Burleigh to to Main Beach, and in different pockets and locations, that would rival luxury living anywhere… but it’s such a stretched out city you don’t notice it.”

Under the redevelopment scheme, the new Marina Mirage will comprise seven low-rise buildings with curated retail and dining spaces, a 126-key hotel operated under Marriott International’s Luxury Collection brand, and 38 apartments and villas.

It is understood its four double-storey penthouses each spanning 1000sq m are expected to sell for up to $32,000 per square metre.

Long before he got his hands on the landmark retail asset and its adjoining marina in 2013 for just shy of $60 million, Adelaide-based billionaire Con Makris knew it would one day become a jewel in the family’s property portfolio.

Makris’s son, Jason, who now lives on the Gold Coast, fondly recalls the years of travelling as a young boy to the Glitter Strip with his father.

“There’s photographs of me on the bridge (linking Marina Mirage with the Sheraton Mirage Resort) eating ice cream,” he says.

“My father has always had some gravity to Marina Mirage.

“He kept always thinking ahead and saying ‘One day, I want to own this property. I want to develop this property’.

“And as we’ve gotten closer and closer to those realities, he always gave it the remark of being the best fillet of land in Australia—and he’s absolutely correct.”

Makris Group chief executive Jason Makris (left) with his father and property magnate Con.

▲ Makris Group chief executive Jason Makris with his father and property magnate Con.

Taking the lead on the Marina Mirage project with his wife Natalie, the Makris Group chief executive is reluctant to frame it as stepping out from his hard-working father’s formidable shadow.

Instead, he casts it as an evolution of legacy adapted to a Gold Coast that has grown “bigger, better and brighter”.

“We’ve created this vision together,” he says. “The landscape of the Gold Coast has changed a lot over the past 20 years.

“We’ve seen new precincts form. We’ve seen new shopping malls be renovated. We’ve seen Pacific Fair and Robina Town Centre expand, and now for Marina Mirage and other retail precincts, this means they form a bit of a redundancy.

“We knew this was happening from acquisition and we wanted to make sure that whatever we were going to create in a development, it would have longevity

“So we’ve spent some extra time thinking about that vision.”

Skase’s original development had set a precedent and the 1.9ha site “demands something unique”, Makris says.

“It will be like nothing else that the Gold Coast is delivering at the moment.”

But although the Marina Mirage as we know is to be demolished, its rooftop sails that have become as much a part of the city’s famed but mostly far taller skyline will be recreated as part of the scheme.

“The sails are such an important part of Marina Mirage and its new vision… and the new era of the Australian Riviera,” Makris says.

The new Marina Mirage is positioned as the centrepiece of a $2 billion-plus transformation of The Spit into what is now being sold as the Australian Riviera.

▲ The new Marina Mirage is positioned as the centrepiece of a $2-billion-plus transformation of The Spit anchored with an "Australian Riviera" identity.

Fraser adds that the sails—the brainchild of architect Desmond Brooks—were not only integral to the identity of the property but were also designed to harvest and distribute rainwater to its internal rainforest gardens.

“I’m a great fan of the great Des Brooks and the buildings that he did, particularly up there on The Spit.

“Unlike his highrise work, they practice a kind of austerity… a kind of profoundly simple architecture that stitches well and lets the landscape overtake it. And so we took that as a challenge.”

Central to the new design is a palm garden and 50m pool around which its seven buildings are arranged, creating an internal oasis that modelling indicates will be 8C to 10C cooler than the areas surrounding it.

The overall design concept for the redevelopment comes from his and the Makris family’s love of travel and hotels from which emerged a scheme for a heavily landscaped coastal village.

“We put together a design based around all of our favourite moments of travel… and for me, that was sort of focusing on life around the Bosporus River in Istanbul or ancient Byzantium, and all the kind of marina traffic in Venice and stepping off the boat into Harry’s Bar.”

The key was to blend all those experiences with the surrounding natural environment and wrap them in an authentic Australian coastal architecture.

“The idea that Australia could have a kind of new inbound luxury tourism experience where people aren’t just coming for an urban experience, they’re actually coming for a piece of the great Australian lifestyle, which is to be outdoors, jump onto the beach and to do all that within the context of a city edge location, was something too delicious to resist,” Fraser says.

“I can't think of anywhere else that can happen.

“And I think in the next 10 years we are going to see the evolution of one of Australia's great natural and manmade communities.”

▲ The rooftop sails that have become as much a part of the Gold Coast’s famed but mostly far taller skyline will be recreated as part of the new scheme.

As well as exuding a superyacht air of exclsuiveness it was important the property also remained publicly accessible, he says.

“It would have been very easy for it to become a kind of cloistered residential estate but it’s just not going to be like that. It will have something for everyone.”

The biggest challenge of the design journey for Fraser—an architect whose portfolio has long been dominated by city-defining skyscrapers—also has led to a professional reawakening.

“If someone had told you five years ago that Callum was doing a three-story building you would have said ‘bullshit, that’s just not something that happens’,” he says.

“I’m used to spending six or seven years on a project… but we’re talking up to 100 storeys. And when you’re designing tall buildings the equations are very different.

“So as we’ve been going through this process we’ve been learning a new language of low-rise climatological architecture… and I’m loving it, just being able to loosen up the building fabric and kind of create a more porous architecture.”

Another thing he has embraced is the Gold Coast’s architectural freedom.

“If you sit back and you have a look at the heritage of Gold Coast architecture, you see an extraordinary collection of buildings that are very inventive and different and quirky,” Fraser says.

“I think that there is a lot of jealousy that people hold for the Gold Coast. And in architectural circles, they kind of talk it down because they are threatened by its freedoms ... and they’re very envious.

“It’s a place born from speculators that were making a city in the middle of nowhere, and making it happen in a way that they weren’t too concerned about what other people’s opinion was.

“The freedom that comes with that approach is a very liberating freedom.

“And I think you still feel that in the city today, and that’s why everybody’s getting the f**k out of Melbourne and coming here.”

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