Beefed-up 10-storey apartment bid for South Terrace
A developer has applied to build a 10-storey luxury apartment tower on a vacant South Terrace site, changing an earlier proposal that prompted debate about being too “skinny”.
Woodville-based developers Ormond Nominees has lodged plans for a 10-storey, 15-apartment tower at 75-76 South Terrace near the intersection of Morphett Street and South Terrace.
The tower, featuring balconies overlooking the southern park lands, will hold 10 single-storey apartments with two bedrooms and two bathrooms.
Five penthouse apartments – each stretching across two floors with four bedrooms and four bathrooms – are planned for levels 2, 4, 6 and 9.
A representative for Ormond Nominees said the apartments would likely be priced between $1.5 and $2 million.
“Our target market is elderly people who want to downsize from Burnside, Beaumont and want something quiet,” the representative said, adding that the resident population may be between 15 and 30 people.
The project cost is under $10 million, according to the developers, meaning it will likely be assessed by the Adelaide City Council’s assessment panel rather than the state government’s State Commission Assessment Panel (SCAP).
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In June 2023, the Council Assessment Panel rejected an earlier proposal from Simon Voss Developments for a 12-storey apartment and office tower on the site.
The council later that year approved a scaled-down eight-storey proposal put forward by Carlisle Developments, which has since sold the site to Ormond Nominees.
The earlier tower proposals only used half (170 square metres) of the narrow vacant lot (338 square metres) on South Terrace.
This meant the tower designs, at a width of just 5.58 metres, were unusually slender for a CBD development.
Ormond Nominees’ new development proposes using the whole of 75-76 South Terrace, doubling the tower’s width to 11.17 metres.
The developers’ representative said the building has gone “off its diet”.
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“We’ve changed it from a skinny building of 10 apartments to a wider building which takes in the block next door,” they said.
The representative said Adelaide City Council was concerned about the original proposal because it would leave the narrow lot next to it vacant and hard to redevelop.
Ormond Nominees’ proposal is 38.5 metres tall at its roof and 40.9 metres at the lift overrun.
The site is zoned for a height of 36 metres, although the developers argue the extra height is justified because the lift overrun “won’t be readily visible from ground level”.
They also say the greater width of this tower compared to the earlier proposals means “the additional height is much less accentuated”.
“The mass and scale of the building is more proportional, and will make a positive contribution to the streetscape,” planning consultants Advantage Planning wrote in documents published by PlanSA last week.
The tower is situated between a three-storey building at 74 South Terrace and a two-storey building at 77 South Terrace.
But the developers argue that development activity in the South Terrace precinct is set to increase.
“There are other tall buildings along South Terrace and redevelopment of the lower scale existing buildings is inevitable over time given increasing land values and the continuing demand for new dwellings,” Planning Advantage said.
The tower proposal is out for public consultation until August 23.
