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LITTLE GOLD STREET
Aust Institute of Building Residential Construction up to $2.5 Million
Value $2.5M
 The Little Gold Street Residences project at 1a Little Gold Street, Brunswick in Victoria was the first site acquired for development by McCorkell Brown Pty Ltd. We were searching for a property in the south Brunswick area that could be converted to residences in a way that would meet our Company objectives. In the Little Gold Street site we found a dilapidated warehouse that would ordinarily be met with a wrecker’s ball. We saw the potential to firstly preserve the industrial “feel” of the area, and secondly to honour the industrial heritage of Brunswick by designing a building that provided a juxtaposed streetscape of the labour-intensive industries of old and the ultra-modern urban edge. Investigation revealed the building to have operated as a machinists’ factory until the latter part of the 20th Century, before being used for periods as an artists’ studio, squat and most recently as the headquarters for the S11 protest group around 1999/2000.
The building presented some interesting structural challenges. It suffered from significant “concrete cancer” which required rectification and the new building had to be constructed within the old - maintaining the original roof structure to provide support and adding temporary structural steel bracing until the new structure could be tied back into the existing.
Construction was formally undertaken by the McCorkell Brown Projects entity within original time (9 months) and budget ($900,000) estimates.
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