Peoples Palace Refurbishment

Brisbane City QLD 4000 Located in the heart of the Brisbane CBD, the peoples palace is a special built heritage building with rare and distinctive attributes of Australian architecture. The goal is to reinvigorate this landmark with a harmonious new design that will capture the cultural history and legacy of the city.

Client
Yamaji Australia Developments Pty Ltd

Status
Expected Completion 2022

Traditional Custodians of the land
The Turrbal and Jagera people

Gross Area
5,251m²

Concept

KIRK's Peoples Palace Refurbishment aims to reinvigorate the landmark building with a harmonious new design that will capture the cultural history and legacy of Brisbane.

The new design will capture the cultural history and legacy of the area – where the Queenslander vernacular can stand shoulder to shoulder in and around the modern streets of the Brisbane CBD.

The revived People’s Palace will become a cultural destination, exciting and inspiring guests and exceeding their expectations.

The People’s Palace is but one building of the historic fabric of the Brisbane CBD and will benefit from the ongoing transformation and cultural revival.

The basis for the proposed works arose due to two reasons:

First, the challenging market conditions for the current tenants’ hospitality business requires a much needed update to guest suites and overall experience.

Second, there is an urgent an necessary set of building repairs required to improve the building's current condition. Due to its age, now over +100 years old, the structure suffers from water ingress and aging of services which are at the end of their serviceable life.

Context

The former People’s Palace in Brisbane was built as a temperance hotel by the Salvation Army and opened in 1911. The building is now in private ownership and operated as a backpacker hostel.

The building is listed in the Queensland Heritage Register, so it is protected by the Queensland Heritage Act 1992.

The People’s Palace was built by the Salvation Army, a Christian church and charitable organisation. It was one of several temperance hotels built in Australia and New Zealand to provide comfortable accommodation where alcohol was prohibited. The Salvation Army bought the Brisbane site at the corner of Ann and Edward Streets in 1908 and assigned its in-house architect, Colonel Saunders, to design the hotel.

When opened in 1911, The People's Palace was a substantial brick building with three floors above a basement, a prominent corner tower, and balconies overlooking the two streets. Two more floors were added a year or two later, followed shortly by another floor.

The Salvation Army continued to operate the hotel until the 1970s when it leased the premises to a commercial hotel operator. Around 1985 the church adapted parts of the building to serve as offices for its social services. In 1996 the church sold the building to the present owner; the building is currently leased by a backpacker hostel operator.

Sustainability

The extension building utilises CLT as the primary vertical structure. This increases the column-free useable floor area with the added benefit of providing a more solid façade, thereby providing a very efficient building envelope. The resulting effect of exposed timber structure, smaller intimate column-free floor plates, and windows produces a completely new typology for the hotel guest suite.

To enable timely delivery of the new roof deck guest suites, the refurbishment’s structure is CLT which will be expressed internally and allows for a much shorter build time when compared to conventional systems and be a safer and quieter material to work with. Timber buildings also generally have a lower embodied energy, being a sustainable and efficient alternative to traditional construction systems like steel and concrete.

The versatility and lightweight nature of the timber mean it can be designed to be easy to disassemble, recover, reuse, recycle and be designed into historic structures. Prefabricated timber can also reduce construction periods.

Collaboration

KIRK collaborated with a Heritage Architect to fast-track the Heritage Council approval process, a Contractor to confirm the supply of materials and constructability sequences (due to the inner CBD site location), and Structural & Services teams to carefully work with the constraints of the historic building, and a surveyor / 3D scanning specialists to provide current and accurate record documentation.