One of Sydney’s last remaining wool stores has been conserved and adapted as a multi-level hospitality venue in the city’s heritage heartland. The giant skeleton of Hinchcliff House is brilliantly reborn as a pivotal place within the Quay Quarter Lanes precinct at Circular Quay, Sydney, alongside works from SJB, Studio Bright, Silvester Fuller, Lippmann Partnership, and ASPECT Studios. Quay Quarter Lanes won the 2022 Walter Burley Griffin Award for Urban Design at the Australian Institute of Architects National Awards.

Its original sandstone, brick, and mighty hardwood trusses are revived and expressed as the backdrop to a glamorous new dining destination, the jewel of a new precinct, reborn and ready for another century of service.

After 150 years, the two largely intact wool stores - built for colonial merchant Andrew Hinchcliff – are transformed, their material structures restored in collaboration with Urbis Heritage. Hand-cut sandstone and brick walls, timber beams, and bearers are all revived, with incisions for extra light and new insertions crafted in fine black steel. The interiors were designed in collaboration with Mitchell & Eades, home to two fine dining restaurants and an underground bar carved into the sandstone basement. A freestanding steel staircase and elevator connect all three dining levels. The exterior restoration of the sandstone walls included the reinstatement of its original crowning glory – a giant golden ram atop the northern parapet.

Photography: Jiwon Kim, Phil Noller, and Rory Gardiner