BARC — Blacktown Animal Rehoming Centre

The Project

BARC is the largest animal shelter in the Southern Hemisphere, a $36m facility housing up to 380 dogs and cats across six low-lying pavilions that reach into the Cumberland Woodland landscape at Owen Street, Blacktown. Sam Crawford Architects designed a building that genuinely rethinks what a shelter can be: each "finger" pavilion maximises natural light and ventilation to reduce animal stress, while a 100-metre artwork of multicoloured vertical blades by Lymesmith, the "Bird Screen", ties the six buildings together along the street frontage. It is civic architecture at its most ambitious and humane.

The Challenge

Animal shelters are deceptively complex buildings. They need to meet rigorous animal care and biosecurity standards, but they also need to feel warm and welcoming enough that people actually want to visit and adopt. The brief was underpinned by global best-practice research into animal welfare, and my job was to translate that ambition into a buildable, affordable project for a local government client on a greenfield site in Western Sydney, with all the site contamination, geotechnical unknowns, and procurement pressure that entails.

My Approach

I managed this project from concept design through to contractor procurement, working closely with Sam Crawford Architects across the concept and schematic phases to hold the design intent together while keeping the programme and budget honest. Early on, I ran site due diligence including contamination assessments and geotechnical investigations to make sure we understood the ground before committing to a design. I then prepared the full tender documentation and ran the competitive procurement process, which resulted in AW Edwards being appointed as the construction contractor. The framework we established in those early phases carried through to the completed building.

The Outcome

BARC opened in 2023 and has since been recognised internationally, a 2024 World Architecture Festival finalist, and Gold at the 2025 Better Future World and GOV Design Awards. More than the accolades, it genuinely changed how people in Western Sydney think about animal shelters. Walking through the finished building, I could see how the decisions we made during concept and procurement had held, and the design intent survived intact, which is rarer than it should be. Managing a project of this scale and technical complexity from first sketch to contractor appointment taught me how to protect ambitious design through pragmatic process, which is exactly the skill I bring to every project at Yaxley Studio today.