Ascent Apartments: Stylish Living At Melbourne's Peak.pdf

Located on the highest point in St Kilda, the Ascent Apartments offers uninterrupted views, stylish interiors, and a quality lifestyle that comes with living in this piece of Melbourne. Ascent was designed by leading architectural firm Bruce Henderson Architects and features 82 one bedroom and two bedroom apartments of various sizes over 14-levels. Inside Ascent’s striking sculptural façade, its designer apartments feature sophisticated open-plan living and are bathed in natural light. Two levels of residential basement parking are also available as are common facilities for residents at the building’s ground level. These facilities incorporate an internal lounge space (featuring state-of-the-art AV facilities) and a landscaped external courtyard area with bespoke-designed fixed and loose external seating, and cooking facilities.

The building resides on a small site between The Manse, a mid Victorian heritage residence at 42 Barkly Street, and the St Kilda Road frontage. Architecturally the building presents as a tripartite vertical division (reflecting the proportions expressed on the front façade of the heritage building) over a dynamic sculpturally-expressed podium form. While from an architectural point of view incorporating a high tower onto a constrained site adjacent to a low-scale heritage building was always going to be a challenge, the result has been a high degree of amenity.

The smaller nature of the site and relatively small floor plate for a tower of Ascent’s scale, enabled the apartments on each level to achieve excellent exposure to natural light and ventilation in all rooms. Performance-rated double-glazing has been used on the building’s north façade, which is complemented by the solid projecting balconies, which passively shade the building. Smaller glazed openings on the east and west protect against the summer heat from low-angle eastern and western sun. Thermally-massive materials are incorporated throughout the building as insulation-to-wall assemblies, resulting in excellent passive and active energy performance. Rainwater is captured from all roof areas for re-use in the building, while stormwater drainage from the balconies is treated through a rain garden, forming part of the public space at ground level.

Providing a dramatic, yet sympathetic backdrop to the existing heritage building when viewed from Barkly Street, the Ascent development acts as a transition between surrounding buildings on St Kilda Road. The height of modern living This $30M project is comprised of 82 sophisticated and stylish apartments with open-plan living all set within a striking, sculptural façade over 14-levels with extensive sustainability features and a spacious resident terrace featuring an outdoor dining area and interconnected lounge and media room.

Developer : Goal Property Group
Main construction company : Hacer Group Pty Ltd
Architect : Bruce Henderson Architects Pty Ltd
STRUCTURAL ENGINEER : 4D Workshop
Project value : $30 million
Force Precast Australia has been installing precast panels since 2011 and has gained a solid reputation within the building industry, working on significant projects across Melbourne. They worked directly for building company Hacer on the Ascent Apartments project, undertaking the complete precast panel installation. The panels themselves were secured on specially designed brackets; this suspended the precast so that the concrete slab could be poured to incorporate them, requiring a different method for installation.

Originally, Force Precast Australia started out installing panels for smaller builders, before moving on to larger projects. They now primarily focus on high rise, tower-crane buildings. Of course, they are not limited to this type of building, they also do small, medium and large buildings. They pride themselves on good communication and exceeding their clients’ expectations throughout the job.

Access Industries has become a market leader in door manufacturing, offering the widest selection of timber doors, commercial timber doors, metal frame, steel frames and partition doors in Melbourne. They supplied all the doors to the apartment entries, stairwell and lobby in the Ascent Apartments development. The company provided service doors and fire doors as well as metal doors.