34 Hunter Street Hotel

Disciplines
Acoustics, Electrical, Fire Protection, Hydraulics, Mechanical, Sustainability, Vertical Transportation

Markets
Hospitality

Offices
Sydney

Key People

David Steblina

Hydraulics Project Engineer, Principal

Joseph Walsh

Mechanical Engineer, Director

Olivier Gaussen

National Acoustics Coordinator, Principal

Rowan Barwood

Electrical Section Manager, Principal

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The 34 Hunter Street project transformed a Sydney commercial building into a luxury hotel featuring 282 rooms, a café and retail outlets. In addition to the change of use the project also involved the addition of four new levels to the building.

The project has been named ‘The Tank Stream’ as one of the main challenges associated with the project was to accommodate the change of use within a structure from the 1960’s.

Challenges:

• One of the challenges for the overall building was to achieve the required internal noise levels within the hotel rooms.
• As the existing façade remained unaltered, WGE needed to provide a strategy and a glazing system that was compliant with the City of Sydney Development Control Plan (DCP).
• The other challenge associated with the design of the façade was the curtain wall design of the four proposed additional floors that are located on top of the existing building.

Meeting the challenges:

Indeed the City of Sydney DCP qualifies hotel buildings as residential buildings and therefore applies very stringent internal noise criteria as compulsory requirements. As the building is located in the heart of Sydney’s CBD, which typically has constant traffic flow from 5am to 2am the next day, strict criteria applies and therefore the design of the building façade was a critical component for the project to be able to obtain an occupation certificate post construction.

A lot of time was invested in coordinating the curtain wall façade between the architectural aspect, thermal performance, structural performance and acoustic performance. The team developed an iterative and innovative process which allowed the coordination and development of the façade to satisfy all stakeholders.

Additional challenge:

Refurbishing an existing building and changing its use normally presents challenges. It is even more challenging when it is changing from a building with no mandatory acoustic requirements to a building that has more stringent acoustic standards to be met.

Meeting this challenge:

In order to achieve the National Code of Construction acoustic performance requirements and maintain a floor to ceiling height suitable for a hotel the team had to design a specific ceiling system that achieved airborne and structure borne requirements within a very constrained space. This was achieved by using particular materials and structural design for the ceiling system within each room.