The Lussh venue had no fire insurance, blaze was the third in months: owner

The owner of Woolloongabba wedding business The Lussh had no fire insurance before an inferno tore through the heritage-listed building last week.

Speaking publicly for the first time since last Wednesday’s massive blaze, which engulfed the top floor of the 100-year-old Hubert Street events space, Maree Henry also said the fire could have been prevented.

The roof of the popular Lussh wedding venue collapsed in the massive blaze.Credit: Reddit

The fire broke out in a neighbouring building, one of several surrounding the venue that had been left derelict and open to squatters and vandals.

“This was actually the third fire we’d had in two months,” Henry, the founder of Queensland fashion label DISSH, told ABC Radio Brisbane on Monday.

“All the buildings around us had been purchased by a developer … [but] these buildings had been abandoned and just allowed to deteriorate,” she said.

While developers have lodged plans for residential towers, as well as restaurants and shops, the state government’s decision not to rebuild the Gabba stadium for the 2032 Olympics has put a cloud over the area.

Henry said incidents with squatters staying in the empty buildings had been ongoing, including threats to staff, graffiti, break-ins and property damage.

The owner of nearby business Snowscape, Callum Rogers, told this masthead in the days after the fire: “there have been issues in the past. There’s been calls made [to police].”

Henry said the neighbourhood was “quite dangerous”.

“We could be sitting in the backyard and [squatters] would smash a window out of the top. The glass just would fall on anyone who happened to be on the ground below.

“The council just told us that it was a private property and that there was nothing they could do, so … this continued to happen, but occasionally, they would come in and do a very ad hoc attempt at boarding it up.”

The Georgian Revival hall previously hosted events as The Lushington, having been mostly renovated by Leonik Plechanski, who purchased the building in 2001.

Plenchanksi retained ownership of the building, but sold the events business to Henry in 2020, who renovated before relaunching the space as The Lussh.

Today little remains of the two-storey venue. The fire gutted the upper level and caused the roof to cave in, while parts of the ceiling collapsed on the ground floor “and there’s a lot of smoke and water damage”.

“We were insured for floods and a lot of other things, but not for fire,” Henry said.

Inside The Lussh before the fire.Credit: Senncha Studio; Lover of Mine; About Time Co

She said she was near the venue celebrating her business’s success with her staff when the fire broke out.

“It was a bit ironic, really, because we were celebrating our fourth anniversary at The Lussh,” she said, adding her team felt at the time there was “so much to celebrate”, with an influx of event inquiries.

They scrambled to find alternative locations for weddings scheduled for the weekend and were now focused on securing spaces for four weddings booked this week.

She added she was also looking at the “long-term plan of finding alternative places that we can lease”.

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