The luxury apartment developer behind a three-tower high-rise on the Chellingworth motors site in Nedlands has succeeded in a second bid to make changes to its previously approved $320 million proposal — despite the best efforts of the local council.
Melbourne-based Gurner Group’s plans to add 101 apartments to their already approved development at 97-105 Stirling Highway were passed 3-2 by the Metro-Inner Joint Development Assessment Panel after a four-hour meeting on Thursday.
There will be 332 apartments spread across the 17, 22 and 24-storey towers, with the new designs incorporating more one to two-bedroom apartments and changing the layout of others to fit.
Changes to the design of the ground floor and podium were also approved, with more amenities for residents including a lap pool, communal dining areas, sauna and spa facilities.
The approval came despite vehement objections from the City of Nedlands council, which hired a lawyer to represent them at Thursday’s meeting.
Grange Development and Costa Property had already secured approval for three towers and 231 apartments at the site in 2021 after their initial plan for four towers was quashed the year before.
Gurner then joined the project and made an application to amend the plans in August last year, which included adding three storeys to the smallest tower and upping the number of apartments to 368.
That approach was rejected by the JDAP, which considered the revised plans to “substantially change the development” and needed to be submitted as a new proposal.
The rejection was appealed to the State Administrative Tribunal last year, leading to three rounds of mediation and ultimately Thursday’s marathon meeting and decision.
Lawyers representing both the council and developers faced off at the meeting over whether the JDAP was legally required to consider the revised plans — estimated to be valued about $500 million — as an amendment to the approved development or as a new proposal.
McLeods Lawyers managing partner David Nicholson, representing the council, described the changes proposed as “extensive” with a “close to 400 per cent increase” in the number of one-bedroom apartments.
He said he believed if the changes were approved, there were grounds for a third party to pursue a judicial review.
But developers’ counsel Paul McQueen from Lavan said he considered there to be “no legitimate basis” to submit the amended plans as a new proposal and “no realistic prospect … of any third party succeeding on a judicial review in the Supreme Court”.
The City of Nedlands had argued changing the number of apartments and their design to fit the already approved towers would have too big an impact on the amenity of the apartments.
The city was also concerned about the impact more apartments would have on traffic.
“The internal amenity of such a large and prominent multiple dwelling development within the city should remain high quality,” a city officer report said.
“The original development was approved partly on the basis of the high-quality amenity and any amendments should not drastically reduce that amenity. The room layouts and functionality still have room for improvement.”
JDAP member Cr Fergus Bennett said the new design was worse and less appealing to the Nedlands community.
“This is quite clearly a Trojan horse development. You promise the world to get an approval, an approval with much more height and plot ratio than should really have been allowed but then you wind back all the benefits … I find that actually quite disingenuous,” he said.
Cr Bennett said given it would become the biggest development in the city’s history, the council’s appeal for more information on the traffic impact and design of the apartments should have occurred before an approval was made.
“Clearly the amenity in these apartments is questionable and more work needs to be done on how these apartments are laid out,” he said.
“This is actually predominately a one-bedroom dormitory …. and 70 per cent of them likely have compromised amenity.”
Cr Rebecca Coghlan said the proposal was “grossly out of context” with the area and its impact on Nedlands would be felt for many years.
“Don’t fatigue because you want to get this off the books, we have got to keep engaged with this because it is essentially a legal argument,” she said.
“I know this had approval …. but with due respect this isn’t welcomed in the suburbs and it won’t be welcomed to high-rise Nedlands, because that is what we’re creating today — welcome to high-rise Nedlands.”
Deputy presiding member John Syme said the changes proposed were “well within the scope” of what could be considered as an amendment and increasing the number of apartments was a positive.
“This is actually a positive introduction to the City of Nedlands and certainly a positive introduction to the metropolitan area generally … and it is quite a substantial improvement to what was there before,” he said.
Presiding member Francesca Lefante said the development was an appropriate mix of apartment types for the site.
“There are more and more people that are choosing to create a mixed type of housing and we have seen and we continue to see a lot of smaller typologies being produced and I think that is not a negative,” she said.
The developers must provide an amended traffic impact assessment to the City of Nedlands and amend the internal layouts of some of the apartments before building can begin.