Owners and tenants are moving into one of Melbourne’s first apartment buildings to achieve a four-star Green Star rating.
Lend Lease’s newly completed Serrata building, a bold sculpted-concrete complex in Docklands, gained its green credentials from innovative design rather than expensive features, according to its architect, Robert Stent of Hayball.
Many modern green buildings incorporate expensive features such as tri-generating electricity capacity and black-water recycling to achieve green ratings.
But the 15-level $90 million Serrata used natural ventilation and lighting in the corridors, car parks and stairwells and other design features to avoid energy-intensive maintenance costs and to reduce tenants’ owners’ corporation fees.
Each apartment has energy and water-monitoring tools. Other features such as the 40,000-litre rooftop rainwater tank for toilet flushing and watering of communal gardens helped achieve the certification, Stent said.
Small things such as thinking about the design of the building’s external stairways early in the planning stage and placing them in such a way as to encourage their use to access nearby shops and parks, helped create a more sustainable structure.
”It’s more about how people use the building rather than attaching capital-intensive things onto it,” he said.
The design detail also extends to street level. Docklands is infamous for its windy open spaces but Serrata incorporates small street-level structures, such as a bolt-hole kiosk and other retail spaces, that adapt to different uses at different times of day and create public gathering places.
Stent said the building created a sense of ”place-making and smallness” despite its size.
Another Lend Lease structure, the nearby Convesso complex in Victoria Harbour, achieved a four-star rating from the Green Building Council during the rating system’s pilot phase.
Monash University’s Briggs & Jackomos student residence at its Clayton campus was the first residential building to gain a five-star Green Star design rating. “We are yet to see a multi-unit residential project achieve a six-star green rating, but the momentum is starting to build,” said the council’s chief, Romilly Madew.
A Lend Lease spokeswoman said all but three of the Serrata’s 144 one and two-bedroom apartments had been sold.
