Eliza Apartments

A Tony Owen design

Freeform natural stone cladding as it has never been seen before….

This Multi-Award Winning Eliza Apartments building is situated next to the Sheraton Hotel on Elizabeth Street, opposite Hyde Park in Sydney.

The combination of elegant, curvaceous lines with natural Australian Piles Creek sandstone cladding beautifully connects to surrounding buildings from a by-gone era whilst simultaneously grounding this new building in the 21st century

To link the various elements of this new light weight prefabricated stone facade, Ceerose Developments Pty Ltd. contracted Stoneplus NSW Pty Ltd.   Our brief included co-ordinating the design with the architects (Tony Owen & Partners), Façade Engineers (Inhabit Group), and Ceerose as well as with other façade contractors to combine all the aluminium & steel support frames with the internal & external stonework during the relevant construction phases.

Due to the unorthodox & freeform shapes required, this cladding could not be traditionally installed on site as the façade protruded out past the line of the scaffold. This meant we needed to wait for the scaffold to come down before the prefabricated panels could be installed. 

The attachment of the prefabricated frames could only be achieved by drilling into the slab edge and a 450mm high up-stand.

For this purpose, we were required to take the weight out of the stone and robotically mill all six faces of each piece of stone to achieve a general 60mm cladding thickness. We were required to design, build and engineer a 3D tubular support framework system to attach the cladding which would eventually be hoisted up onto the building as a prefabricated unit.

To this end, we used numerous high end 3D modelling programs such as Solid Edge, Inventor, Rhinoceros 5.0 and AutoCAD which enabled us to incorporate light weight support structures onto the building and connect the stone. This was further realised due to the absolute accuracy in robotically milling the attachment kerfs.

All the prefabricated frames for both the façade and the internal lobby were diamond wire sawn from selected quarry blocks, milled, kerfed, populated, assembled and sealed in our yard at Brookvale using cutting edge laser surveying equipment and robotic technology and then transported to a holding yard prior to installation.