Watermark Plaza and The Quays apartment block developers Nigel McKenna and Greg Wilkinson celebrated this week with the opening of a display unit to promote remaining unsold units in the hotel side of the linked Viaduct Basin buildings.
McKenna says that, even half-finished, the two buildings on the city edge of the basin have a presence and style. While they have presented a growing barricade on Customs St West and Lower Hobson St, Watermark Plaza rising six levels and The Quays four, the clutter of a building site has hidden quite how they will open out to the water.
“Most people would have built to the boundary,” says McKenna. That would have left a public walkway around the edge of the basin, with buildings rising immediately above. Instead, McKenna says he fought to get the buildings stepped back to create a piazza area, semi-enclosed by the way the structures have been wrapped around a corner of the basin.
Around this piazza, the two apartment buildings will have 13 restaurants at ground level – no restaurant chains, no bars (except for a hotel foyer brasserie) and all but two spoken for.
Above them, the Watermark building will have a wide deck for use by first-floor residents, acting as a buffer against the hum of ground-level activity. Listed Australian developer and property manager Mirvac will run most of the Watermark apartments as a Sebel boutique hotel, with only six units taken by owner-occupiers.
Originally Mirvac had said it would take a minimum of 85 and maximum of 120 under the hotel guarantee to investors, but Wilkinson says it has now extended that to all 138 units not taken by owner-occupiers. Most of the units facing the water have been sold – four of the 41 originally in the hotel pool remain unsold and nine of the 24 which did not fall into the hotel pooling arrangements.
Bayleys is about to promote the 78 back units, most of which remain unsold. “On value, we’re almost 70 per cent sold,” says Wilkinson. He and McKenna are partners in the Watermark development company, Plaza Development. McKenna’s project management company is charge of bout that $52 million project and its neighbour, the $30 million The Quays, and he is developer of The Quays on his own.
That project, designed for residence rather than as a hotel, has 68 apartments, of which only 10 remain unsold. It will be completed early in November, followed by the opening of the Sebel hotel a month later and progressive openings of the restaurants over the two months. “There are a lot of things that on completion I hope people will be impressed by,” McKenna said this week.
“We’ve made a feature out of the entry, a blade wall that will go 100 feet high and will be clad with natural blue-stone. There’s a temptation to do it with artificial materials. I wanted to do it with something natural that would last.
“The lift lobbies have floor-to-ceiling glass so you can see out over the water. All the materials are permanent – things like the powder-coated aluminium window frames – there’s nothing cheap and nasty about it. And we haven’t gone for trendy cedar shutters. Silky oak is used in the built-in joinery – very much like rewarewa, which is in short supply – and a red beech on the furniture to complement it.”
Two other design features have gained in importance as Auckland’s inner-city apartment boom has progressed – ceiling heights and the kind of glass used. The standard eight-foot stud in many New Zealand homes equates metrically to 2.44m and some apartment developers have raised their heights to 2.5 or 2.6m, with higher ceilings in some of the office building conversions. McKenna has opted for 2.7m.
As apartment occupants have also raised questions about the ability to shut out external sound, the performance of windows has also become important. McKenna has opted for 12mm laminated glass in some other high-class developments. The first Viaduct apartments completed were stage one of Latitude 37.
The second stage of that is also finished, Fletcher Properties’ The Point is fast approaching completion and, on Fanshawe St, the first three buildings in the lowrise Maritime Square office park will soon be ready.
