Grant Thornton House

The Grant Thornton House project was an invited design/tender submission to redevelop the existing ANZ Tower & Podium at 215 Lambton Quay. The brief called for a design response to upgrade the podium while acknowledging Lambton Quay's ‘Premier Street’ status, providing an elegant, commercially viable and better connected ‘base’ to this central citybuilding.

The ANZ podium and tower, built in 1978, is situated on a unique ‘island’ Wellington site intersecting Lambton Quay, Featherston, Hunter and Grey Streets. The existing podium housed the ANZ bank, Esprit Retail and a Wellington City Council managed publictoilet.

The redevelopment of the Podium integrated new components with the existing architecture and fabric of the building — focusing greatest intervention at the high profile corners, tower entries, and street edges changing the transparency, grain and scale of tenancies, tower address and integration of services and public toilets at streetlevel.