The tallest buildings in the suburb of Baulkham Hills & the Norwest Business Park.

Located at 500m from Norwest Metro station, the Esplanade development features two mixed-use, lakefront 20-storey towers reaching a maximum height of 65m. The site includes a ground floor waterfront restaurant and retail precinct, three levels of offices, a large landscaped podium including outdoor cinema, pool and gym facilities, 267 apartments with a total of 654 car parking spaces over 5 underground levels.

The development features several unique designs such as the public through-site walkway suspended over the lake. This "boardwalk" structure was built with a composite steel and concrete deck system on screw piles, facilitating fast construction despite the difficult over-water location. In addition, the building showcases a "glass edge" pool, on a suspended slab, requiring both vibration isolation and seismic restraint.

TTW overcame numerous highly constrained architectural parameters such as the constant layouts changes throughout the residential tower and the large podiums. Featuring several penthouses and residential layouts over commercial, retail and parking levels, TTW resolved the layout changes by aligning loadbearing elements to minimize transfers where possible and utilizing column walks and transfer floors where required. The large footprint and corresponding seismic mass of the podium and sub-podium levels were laterally supported by a combination of core walls, perimeter retaining walls and floor frame-action. These lateral elements also provide stability against unbalanced soil loads owing to variations in external ground level across the site

Client: Aoyuan

Architect: Turner Studio

Builder: Westbourne Constructions

Value: $120M

Completion: 2020

Sector: Residential

Services: Structural, Civil, Traffic