The Store — DPIE & TfNSW Fitout, Newcastle

The Project

The Store at Stewart Avenue, Newcastle was a government workplace fitout delivering a shared regional hub for two agencies, the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment and Transport for NSW. It was part of a broader push to give regional public servants the same quality of workplace that their Sydney counterparts were getting, and to consolidate scattered offices into fewer, better-designed locations.

The Challenge

Multi-agency fitouts are always more complicated than single-tenant ones. DPIE and TfNSW each had their own workplace requirements, their own stakeholders, and their own expectations, and both needed to be resolved within a single design. On top of that, the regional context meant a smaller pool of local consultants and contractors, so procurement needed a flexible approach. I had to deliver to the same A-Grade government workplace standards I was used to in Sydney, but without the depth of market that a metro project offers.

My Approach

I managed the project on behalf of Property & Development NSW, drawing on the fitout methodology I had developed through similar projects including the Sydney City Hub and The Glasshouse. I engaged the design consultants, managed the design development process to satisfy both agencies' briefs, and ran the procurement and contract administration under the GC21 framework. A big part of the job was simply keeping two sets of stakeholders aligned, making sure that the compromises required in a shared workplace were understood and accepted by both sides before they became problems on site.

The Outcome

The Store was completed in 2022 and now operates as a functional multi-agency hub in the Hunter. It proved that the government workplace model we had been refining in Sydney could translate to a regional context without losing quality. For me personally, it was a project that sharpened my ability to manage competing stakeholder interests, a skill that is central to every project I take on at Yaxley Studio, where balancing client needs, budgets, and design ambitions is the daily work.