If you need to know where to find 4000 colanders at short notice, just ask GPT’s Steven Turner.
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If you’ve dropped in to the new Wollongong Central building in recent weeks, you might have found Steven Turner standing outside Coles, smiling calmly amid the riotous Spanish tiles.
Even a few weeks after the fanfare of the grand opening, he still looks amazed as shoppers dart into the new food stores and blur past wooden banisters on the upper levels.
And, after 7 years as the development manager – and public face – of the major GPT Group project, you can hardly blame the 42-year-old for admiring his hard work.
''There was a responsibility to do something different and put Wollongong on a different trajectory.''
‘‘Sometimes, if I’ve been out of town for a few days and I arrive back, I kind of forget that it’s actually happened,’’ he says.
‘‘It’s really weird.’’
As development manager, Turner has been involved in almost everything to do with building the mall – developing the plans, getting it off the ground financially, working with architects and then actually building the thing.
It’s obvious this long process, which began in 2007, has had an effect on his life: he likens talking about the shopping centre to ‘‘talking about my children’’ and is clearly interested in making sure the tiniest details are right.
The morning the centre opened, as some of the 50,000-plus first-day visitors whirled around him, he stood beneath the 4000 colanders that line the roof of the fresh-food level and listened to conversations among the small army of orange-and-black-clad floor staff.
‘‘We had these courtesy crew just standing around and helping people, and the centre team had briefed them so they knew they weren’t just colanders on the ceiling, but that it linked back to the idea of ‘my mother’s kitchen’, which was the architect Susanne Pini’s inspiration for that space,’’ he says.
‘‘They were told all about her story, and about how her Italian parents moved here and what they did.
‘‘So, I was just standing there, eavesdropping, and three or four people went up and asked about why there were colanders on the ceiling. The courtesy crew explained the story, and it was just like I was listening to Susanne Pini talk about her story.
‘‘To hear them tell the story with the same enthusiasm I’d tell it or Susanne would tell it was really rewarding.’’
Shopping centres don’t usually come packaged up with their own personal back story but, as visitors to the centre will likely have noticed, this is no ordinary mall.
There are no labyrinthine corridors or clinical downlights to make up for a structure that mostly resembles a windowless concrete box.
Visible if you look down from the corner of Crown and Keira streets, the green, yellow, pink and orange tiles – which really were shipped in from Spain – are the first and brightest cue that the designers were trying to do something different.
Elsewhere, shapes of Illawarra flame trees are pressed into the concrete walls, craggy steel blades at once resembling the city’s old blast furnaces and its gnarled eucalypts line the main entrance, and wave-like formations of timber rods echo the escarpment and the sea in the central atrium.
All this made life very interesting for Turner and his team, who spent a lot of time grappling with odd questions – like where do you get 4000 colanders to screw to the ceiling? (Turns out the answer is Kmart).
‘‘It’s been a very complex project,’’ he says.
‘‘To deliver some of the finishes we wanted to have were quite unusual – so sitting in a design meeting and saying we wanted to put 4000 colanders on the ceiling. Our business was going, ‘you want to what?’
‘‘Even the balustrades were unusual, because shopping centre balustrades are always, always glass or steel, but we’ve got this bronze mesh clad in timber, which has never been done before.
‘‘So we had to go out to some obscure warehouse and do structural tests on pieces of balustrades, which normally you don’t have to do.
‘‘There’s a lot of things on this job that were not standard.’’
So – in a massive $200 million project that’s already a gamble – why do it?
‘‘There was a responsibility to do something different and put Wollongong on a different trajectory,’’ Turner says.
‘‘We wanted to showcase what was going on in the region – and it turns out all these unusual things are the things I’m most proud of.’’
Such altruistic goals seem like a breath of fresh air from a major property developer, but there must be something in it for GPT?
‘‘Yeah, it is a commercial business at the end of the day, but I’m of the belief that if you have the greatest possible impact you can on the greatest number of people then it’s like a rising tide,’’ Turner says.
‘‘Everyone will benefit – we will be part of that, but hopefully it makes everyone happy.’’
Aside from unusual obstacles, building a shopping centre in the middle of a busy city has many big practical challenges too.
Turner doesn’t even need to be prompted to describe the most difficult one, because it was, quite literally, the hardest.
‘‘We were all quite happy to call it the hardest rock in Australia,’’ he says of the stubborn slab of stone under the GPT site.
‘‘The excavation went longer than it was supposed to and it was a lot higher impact than we wanted it to be. For some particular reason the rock on this site was so uniform in its creation and hardly had any fractures or seams to help you break it up.
‘‘We’d seen other people dig through the same kind of rock, and multiple contractors gave us advice on what the program would be and how long it would take – and everyone was wrong.’’
Record rainfall, including a massive downpour on the Australia Day 2013 weekend, filled the giant hole with five million litres of water. And Wollongong’s persistent winds also caused havoc during the construction process.
The closure of Keira Street was another unforseen – and unpopular – hiccup, but became vital towards the end of the construction period if the project was to finish on time.
But the three-month road closure passed quickly, allowing a swarm of fluoro-clothed workers to fill the street while hundreds more worked inside to fit out shops and eateries.
And then, all of a sudden, it was opening night.
After a day of meeting dignitaries and marvelling at the number of people keen to take a look at his creation, Turner walked to pick up his wife and two sons, aged six and eight, from Wollongong station so they could share in the glory.
‘‘My kids have come to the site a few times and they know that this is what I do – I think they feel quite attached to it,’’ he says.
‘‘I’ve been sitting at home a lot with all these plans and they’ve given me requests for what they want – toys, toys and more toys.’’
Despite a complete lack of toy shops, his six-year-old – who has never known life without his dad working on the Wollongong project – gave it a big tick.
‘‘As we were walking down Crown Street, we turned the corner and my youngest just sort of stood in the middle of the road and held out his arms and said, ‘Finally, I’ve been waiting for this!’’’
The opening was a finish line for the whole city, which has been impatient to get its time as a construction site over and done with, but there’s still at least a year of adjustments and work to be done in terms of the centre’s development.
At the same time, negotiations are well under way to resolve Myer’s lease expiry in 2016, and – as was always planned – there’s scope for a new cinema to be built atop the older Wollongong Central site, and new residential towers on top of the new building.
‘‘I really wanted to keep going and do all of this at the same time, but we just couldn’t get the market there at the time,’’ he says.
Whatever happens to these concepts, it seems Turner will be keeping his Wollongong connection for some time.