Strategy, Architecture, Placemaking

Empire Village is a retail and hospitality precinct located in the beachside suburb of City Beach. The original site housed the athletes' mess hall for the Empire Games in 1962, before becoming a small retail centre during the 1980s. In 2015, due to extensive fire damage, the building was in a state of complete disrepair.

Preserving community connection, creating a local ‘village’ feel, maintaining visual connection to the adjacent green space and children’s playground, and honouring the site’s mess hall and Empire Games history were all key influences for this redevelopment project.

Our scope included architecture, remodelling, reclassifying and repositioning of the site, as well as designing the interiors for the main anchor-tenant, IGA. We aimed to create a precinct that felt visually open, without any prescribed boundaries, where ebb and flow is what draws the local community and beachgoers to visit the centre for their coffee, food and provisions. The common verandah was designed with the local community in mind—a meeting place where people might sit and wait, somewhere central and modest that brings everyone together.

The quality offering and full tenancy of independent retailers continues to strengthen the Empire Village community experience, establishing the precinct as a widely recognised exemplar of small-precinct master planning and redevelopment.