Explained: Victoria Gardens Mixed-Use Development

Sitting in Melbourne’s vibrant inner-east, Victoria Gardens has been the community’s premier retail and lifestyle destination for almost 20 years.  

In that time, the local landscape has changed significantly with a regeneration in the community served by more retail, small business and new residential dwellings.  

Responding to the growth and changes in the local community, Vicinity and co-owner, Salta Properties, are planning for the next stage of Victoria Gardens’ evolution with a mix of residential, commercial, retail, lifestyle and entertainment destinations to serve the inner east for the next two decades and beyond. 

To help digest the plans a little easier, Senior Development Manager Tom Booth walked us through the project. 

The vision for the project here in Victoria Gardens is to effectively knit this centre into the surrounding neighbourhoods for the first time. 

Over the last 20 years, Richmond seen massive population increase through introduction of medium and high-density housing. It's also become a city fringe office location and this project takes that evolution and moves it forward into the coming decades. 

 The project is divided into two distinct precincts: 

• the Doonside precinct to the south west of the existing centre comprises of six residential buildings on top of an 8,000 square metre retail expansion at ground. The retail will be anchored by what we hope will be quite a sophisticated fresh food market hall with those 850 apartments staged over those six buildings. 

• to the east of the centre is the River Boulevard precinct, which will comprise again of around 800 apartments sitting atop what would likely be a retail expansion of ground. 

What I'm really excited about is not just the connections to the surrounding neighbourhood, but the quantity and the quality of the publicly accessible open space we're going to deliver here in Victoria Gardens. In total, it'll be close to a hectare of publicly accessible open space which will be available to use by the Community 24/7, which I think is a great outcome for Richmond.

In addition to the great publicly accessible open space, what we know will be a great benefit to both Richmond and Greater Melbourne will be the economic and job generation delivered by this project. During construction we expect around 330 full-time equivalent jobs and post completion around 3,300 ongoing full time or equivalent jobs generated by the Victoria Gardens project.

Another really exciting part of the project will be reimagining of the the now-closed Loyal Studley Hotel. Built in the 1800s, it hasn't operated as a pub since the late 1980s. We hope to bring it back to its former glory through delivery of the Doonside project.

Victoria Gardens is the ideal spot for this type of development because of its proximity to great transport, to education, to health, to employment and also to some great open spaces like the Yarra trails.

To deliver a really successful mixed-use precinct like this one, it really comes back down to know your market. We've done extensive research on where the gaps might be in delivery of certain retail categories in terms of types of housing and the type of office space that is attractive here in the city fringe. The key is to draw a common thread through all those uses to bring them all together in a language that speaks to each other, and they hang together as one.

This is a significant project for Vicinity and I'm thrilled to be part of it. What excites me and gets me out of bed in the morning is the diversity of the project. In a project like this, it’s not only the assets that we’re directly developing, but all the disciplines the development manager is lucky enough to get their hands on.