Awards / Media

Ed Horton, founding director of award-winning property developers, The Stable Group opens up about sustainable building, limitations of the legacy approach to building, challenging convention, adaptive reuse of old buildings, the need for councils to incentivise sustainability, the embedded electricity network trend, and the housing market.

Chicago, 1910. Industry is booming, vice is rife and an unidentified assassin known as “Shotgun Man” is terrorising Little Italy. It’s also the year that leading Sydney architect John Burcham Clamp visits the city to investigate the latest architectural trends and construction techniques.

What he learns on that trip he puts to use designing a Wrigley’s Chewing Gum factory for the inner-east suburb of Rosebery. The heritage listed building is once again in construction mode as developer Stable Properties transforms the site into 99 apartments.

Stable Group will incorporate a solar-powered internal electricity network designed to substantially reduce strata fees in its re-development of the old Wrigley Chewing Gum factory in Rosebery. ‘The Burcham’ will become an iconic mixed residential/retail complex.

Centrepiece of “The Burcham” – named after the original architectural firm that designed the Wrigleys building in 1918 – will be the retention by Stable of the heritage-listed structure to be extensively renovated and converted to 44 residential apartments. The project will also include two new apartment buildings (one 4 storeys, the other 5) either side of the original building taking the total number of apartments to 99, plus a ground floor retail/commercial unit.