Robert Brown Building Renewal — Royal Botanic Garden Sydney

The Project

The Robert Brown Building is the original home of the National Herbarium of NSW, sitting within the Royal Botanic Garden on Sydney's eastern harbour foreshore. When the Herbarium relocated to a new purpose-built facility at Mount Annan, the Royal Botanic Garden Trust needed to figure out what this building could become. They commissioned a Capital Investment Proposal Study to explore how the Brown Building could be sympathetically repurposed, given its position in one of Sydney's most significant cultural and tourist precincts.

The Challenge

This was not a straightforward adaptive reuse brief. The building sits within a heritage landscape of national significance, so any proposal had to respect both its scientific legacy and its garden setting. At the same time, the Trust needed a programme that could generate real revenue, commercial tenants, events spaces, something that would pay its way, while also enhancing the Gardens' role in the Eastern Harbour City cultural precinct. Balancing those aspirations against the requirements of NSW Heritage, the Greater Sydney Commission's precinct vision, and the Trust's own operational needs made for a genuinely complex stakeholder environment.

My Approach

I managed the study from inception through to delivery of the completed CIPS report and concept design. I engaged Studio Hollenstein and Matthew Pullinger Architects to develop the architectural concept, and facilitated a series of vision workshops with Trust stakeholders to pressure-test the brief and make sure we were solving the right problem. The study explored how the building's CBD-fringe location could support a mixed-use programme, science and education alongside commercial tenancies and function spaces, with revenue streams structured to support the Trust's ongoing operations. Heritage and planning context analysis sat underneath all of it.

The Outcome

The CIPS gave the Trust a credible pathway forward, and the project subsequently proceeded to construction. Renascent delivered the redevelopment under a design-and-construct contract with WMK Architecture, transforming the Brown Building into the Research Centre for Ecosystem Resilience, a mix of gallery space, scientific laboratories, and flexible public zones. Seeing a concept study I managed translate into a built outcome was deeply satisfying. This project reinforced something I carry into every feasibility engagement at Yaxley Studio: the early-phase work of brief development, stakeholder alignment and honest testing of what a building can become is what determines whether a project actually gets built.