Bayswater Warehouse
On Perth’s industrial fringe, the default answer has long been demolition. The Bayswater Warehouse proposes a different question: what if the building already standing is the one worth keeping?
The great industrial buildings of the 19th and early 20th centuries were not merely functional. Their clerestory-lit interiors, exposed trusses and generous volumes understood work as something deserving of light and space. The Bayswater Warehouse recalls that tradition — not through nostalgia, but through the more urgent logic of sustainability and reuse. Rather than replacing the existing structure with a new, faceless tilt-up box, the architects found in the original fabric something worth keeping: a building that, with minimal intervention, could meet contemporary industrial demands while retaining its material honesty and history.
Working within the original envelope of an existing 1970s warehouse, this adaptive reuse project sees the roof lifted to meet the height requirements of industrial uses in the area, opening the building up to new possibilities and uses.
By retaining as much of the existing fabric as possible, the architects were able to cut carbon, reduce construction costs and still elevate the asset’s long-term value. The concrete floors, brick walls, steel trusses and timber purlins were all retained. This involved a careful process of slow demolition and reconstruction. Layered onto this, carefully selected new systems and finishes were introduced to enhance functionality, natural ventilation, daylight performance and thermal comfort. The material palette of painted brick, galvanised steel and polycarbonate cladding is honest, restrained and robust.
Four large tilt-panel glazed doors create a new, activated street frontage, providing opportunities for the space to appeal to a more diverse market segment — coffee roasters, breweries, distilleries and artists’ workshops. A native landscaped frontage softens the industrial context, improving amenity and providing a small community oasis while strengthening the site’s street presence.
Preliminary embodied-carbon analysis recorded a fifty per cent reduction per square metre against a new-build equivalent. The project makes the case that the most sustainable building is often the one already standing, and that a place of manufacture, given the same attention once afforded to the great industrial cathedrals, can still be a place of presence and enduring memory.
