Avantra, Gardeners Road, Mascot

Avantra is an innovative and  eco-friendly 330 unit apartment block in  Mascot ,Sydney. For this project Longton our client wanted a landmark statement development to establish themselves as one of the premier developers in Australia. They also need the project to be economically viable. We explored a number of design options and created the concept of “Streets in the Sky”, which is the idea of stacking streets vertically to recreate the benefits of a low-rise urban community on a high density site. From an environmental point of view it allowed for 100% of the units to have cross ventilation and for the whole building to work as one regarding passive solar design principles. The council rewarded this design excellence by supporting an extra 3 storeys in height and 15% extra gross floor area resulting in a gain of an extra 30 units. Further to this by elevating the podium and having parking at grade we created an elevated urban park between the towers for the residents protected from the road noise by the front building and saved the cost of an extra basement level which in this case was exacerbated by ground conditions that would have made the construction of it even more expensive. Our role here was from securing the site and funding from the project right through to construction.