HUTCHIES’
SON HIN HUTUCIL DERS B
2017
105 1912
YEARS
A Q U A R T E R LY N E W S L E T T E R F O R H U T C H I N S O N B U I L D E R S
M A Y 2 0 17
Grand performance at Palais Theatre Heritage project for Melbourne HUTCHIES’ Melbourne team has been contracted to perform building magic at the famous Palais Theatre in the city’s inner suburb of St Kilda. The Palais which opened in 1927 is a concert venue and theatre with a capacity for 2,896 people, making it the largest seated theatre in Australia. The former cinema which retains many of its original features is considered one of the finest examples of Art Deco architecture in the country and is on the Victorian Heritage Register. Hutchies’ star role will be to refurbish the theatre’s internals at a cost of more than $3 million for the client, Live Nation. The refurbishment will include new box office and cloak room, patch replacement of existing marble tiles, new candy bar, merchandise stand and café, new matching heritage carpet throughout, modifications to existing back of house dressing
Melbourne’s historic Palais Theatre is being refurbished by Hutchies. rooms, a new mezzanine bar and mezzanine ‘winter garden’ with custom glazing and wave roofing. Major ceiling dome restoration will require full erection of platform scaffolding.
Extension of a northern annexe double-storey structure, attached to the existing building, will include a new office space, lift and beer garden on level one. In the 1970s, the theatre regularly presented ballets, including
The Bolshoi, The Kirov, Stars of World Ballet and The Australian Ballet. The theatre hosts more than 100 performances each year and is ranked in the top 20 theatre concert venues in the world.
Lost freight washes up on mountain A SHIPPING container has found its way to the top of Mount Wellington in Tasmania – similar to Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat – but that’s where the comparison ends. The shipping container – now café – was the brainchild of Chris Spillane, Hutchies’ site foreman in Tasmania, who put his construction knowledge to good use in creating a family business and a new tourist attraction on Hobart’s Mount Wellington. Chris and wife, Meg, have been operating a coffee van on the mountain since 2015, but recently received approval from Hobart City Council to build a permanent structure for the next three years,
with an option to extend. Their café is named Lost Freight and, ironically, is built from a modified shipping container. Lost Freight is the first permanent commercial enterprise to operate on Mount Wellington in almost 50 years, after The Springs Hotel was burned down in the Black Tuesday bush fires in 1967. Lost Freight will double as an information centre at the request of the Mount Wellington Trust. Chris and Meg are modern day pioneers on Mount Wellington, with proposals for a new Springs Hotel and a cable car project currently under consideration by the Tasmanian Government.
LEFT: Chris and Meg Spillane outside Lost Freight.