Charter Hall’s plans to revive King William Street

The developer of what will become Adelaide’s largest office building plans to lead a revitalisation of one of Adelaide’s premier boulevards.

The developer of what will become Adelaide’s largest office building is planning to lead a revival of one of the city’s premier boulevards.

Charter Hall plans to draw together landlords, the Adelaide City Council and State Government in a bid to revitalise King William Street where it is building a $450m office tower for Services Australia.

The 14-storey tower on the former Southern Cross Arcade site will transform about 60m of the King William Street frontage.

Charter Hall regional development director Simon Stockfeld said improvements to the streetscape were due and wants government and property owners to work together to make it happen. Mr Stockfeld said his company’s development would be a “significant contributor to the reactivation of King William Street”.

“We’ve obviously got a large street frontage but I think what we’ve found is when you do a big urban regeneration project like this it has a flow-on effect on other property owners around us,” he said.

Charter Hall office chief executive Carmel Hourigan and regional development director Simon Stockfeld at the site of the 60 King William Street project. Image/Russell Millard

“What we’d like to do is see if we can show some leadership and talk to some other property owners along King William, because there must be a commonality of interest.

“Perhaps we can be the ones that can help get the property owners together – and then we’ve got a group of owners, the city council, state government talking strategically about some solutions to help reinvigorate King William Street.

“We agree it’s a great boulevard and that was one of the big attractions for us at this site but it needs some reinvigoration.”

Charter Hall is in talks with a supermarket chain to anchor the ground floor retail component of the King William Street project, which will include coffee shops, food and drink outlets and other services. A pedestrian walkway will link King William Street with James Place.

The tower will comprise 40,000sq m of office space, making it the city’s biggest office building by area once completed in 2023.

Services Australia, which manages public services including Centrelink and Medicare, will relocate more than 2200 staff to the new premises after entering a 10-year lease for 28,500sq m across 10 floors.

Artist’s impression of the 60 King William Street tower. Picture: Supplied

Mr Stockfeld said a new health and hygiene strategy developed by Charter Hall in response to the COVID-19 pandemic would make the building one of the healthiest in the country.

“There are a whole lot of initiatives we thought about during COVID on how we can make our buildings healthier for our tenants and deal with hygiene-related issues,” he said.

“There’s simple things like how to build in hand sanitiser stations so they’re not just plonked into the lobby.

“And then there’s some longer-term things. In the airconditioning systems for example, we’re putting in another system that kills 99.9 per cent of all bacteria, so the indoor air quality will be much better in 60 King William than a typical office building.”

Charter Hall’s GPO Exchange tower in the CBD recently became the first project in the state to achieve Gold WELL certification – the highest standard in delivering health and wellbeing benefits to tenants.