Estate
Luxury by design
Project Details
Location: Forrest, ACT
Completion: 2020
Awards: 2022 ACT Architecture Awards - Award for Residential Housing - Multiple Housing
HIA Apartment Complex Award 2021
Located on the prominent gateway corner of Canberra Avenue, and with Parliament House and St Andrews Church as immediate neighbours, the Estate Forrest project was conceived to ensure an enduring legacy. From the street-fronts that have such generous green verges, and a charming central parkland, Estate Forrest sought to take its place as a contemporary iteration of Walter Burley Griffin’s original concept of Canberra as a garden city.
There are 3 distinct buildings to create the Estate precinct: Empire, Collins and Denison.
Empire is sited on the section of the site that is known as the ‘final approach’ to Parliament House on the Canberra Avenue axis. This is the largest structure of Estate and is characterised by its long, linear curve leading towards State Circuit and peeling away at the crescendo to allow filtered views of Capital Hill. At this point, the continuation of native planting surrounding Parliament House has been pulled into the project with Eucalyptus Brittle Gums being the foundation of the landscape for the central park.
Across this significant break of landscaped greenery that centres on a series of gardens accessible to the public – indeed virtually given over to the public domain – is the second of the Estate’s residential structures. Collins is sited on Hobart Avenue which is a key axis of the Forrest housing precinct and characterised by established grand single dwelling houses. This building is three levels of bark-coloured brickwork, and while still featuring the signature generosity of scale and deep, private balconies, it has a distinctly stouter, manifestly robust identity. The curved dry pressed bricks are arranged to create punched openings to the apartments
The smaller Denison building is set deep within the site and has sensitive interfaces with the Jewish community centre, a primary school oval and a childcare centre. The complicated setting informs the internal layout of the apartments in this single loaded arrangement. All apartments receive their generous northerly amenity from the public central landscape space of the Denison axis.
