Doma Group has passed two milestones on The Store redevelopment with approval for Newcastle's largest stand-alone office building and the arrival of one of Australia's biggest piling rigs to start substructure works on the 12,000 square metre site.
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In April last year, Doma won the tender to develop the former Store site on Hunter Street as a master-planned mixed use development, which included delivery of a new bus interchange.
The $200 million planned development will comprise a five-storey car park, which will float over the bus interchange, two 30-storey residential towers and an 11-storey stand-alone office building.
The car park was approved in October last year and last month the Joint Regional Planning Panel granted Development Application approval for the office building at 6 Stewart Avenue, which will comprise 15,000 square metres of office space. It will be anchored by NSW Government tenants under a pre-commitment for 10 years.
Demolition of the old Store was completed in January. An archaeological investigation followed then remediation of the site for construction of the bus interchange, office and associated car park.
As substructure works began on the car park this week with the sinking of the piles, Doma's general manager of development Gavin Edgar explained a larger piling rig was needed to due to scale of the project.
"Eventually there will be two tall towers that are connected to the car park," Mr Edgar said.
"The piles need to go to bedrock. In that location it's around 40 metres deep. That's a lot more than you'd normally do for a standard car park but the car park can't settle at a differential rate to the towers, which is why they are going so deep."
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Site manager Doug Rielly, from building company Bloc, told the Newcastle Herald on Friday the piling rig, which was floated up from Melbourne, had reached 46 metres since works began this week.
The piling rig augurs down to bedrock. Concrete is pumped in as the augur is extracted then a steel cage is put in to form the piles, which will support the eventual structure.
The DA for the residential towers is expected to be lodged to City of Newcastle soon and Mr Edgar anticipated by the end of the year there could be five cranes on The Store site alone - one on each residential tower, one on the office building and two on the car park.
He expected that to be in addition to cranes on Doma's Honeysuckle sites Lume, Huntington and Little National Hotel plus possibly one on a nine-storey building planned for Merewether Street.
The Rider Levett Bucknall Crane Index Australia for the first quarter of this year reported six cranes in Newcastle compared to 12 at the start of the third quarter last year.
