Architecture begins with listening.

At Snøhetta, critical observation and listening are foundational to the way we design. Before starting a project, we spend time looking closely at a site.

This requires time, curiosity and a willingness to look beyond the most immediately visible conditions. Buildings, landscape, materials and climate form part of the reading, alongside history, community memory and the ways people move through and relate to a place.

Together, these layers reveal what should endure, what can be strengthened and where architecture can make a meaningful contribution.

Our transdisciplinary way of working is central to this process. Architects, landscape architects and interior architects bring different perspectives to the same site, creating a richer understanding of its conditions and possibilities. This shared act of observation establishes the foundation from which a design response can emerge.

The Tea House in Melbourne’s Southbank demonstrates how this philosophy informs our work. Built in 1887, the former warehouse is one of the few surviving traces of the industries that once defined the area. Southbank has since transformed around it, leaving the building as a powerful marker of an earlier city.

Working with our client, MONNO, our approach puts the Tea House at the heart of a new mixed-use precinct comprising seven interconnected built forms. Hotel, workplace, hospitality and retail uses are brought together with a network of publicly accessible terraces, gardens and rooftop landscapes. The project seeks to restore the prominence of the heritage building while establishing new connections between the site, the Birrarung and the surrounding city.

Reading the physical

Our reading of a site begins with its physical conditions, encompassing its architecture and materiality, landscape, orientation, climate and relationship with the surrounding city.

Interestingly, reading the physical conditions also requires us to explore qualities that we cannot immediately see.

The Tea House is a remarkable example of this. Built in 1887-88, the six-storey warehouse was constructed on what was then considered extremely difficult ground. The site sits on the deep, soft sediments of the Yarra, including Coode Island Silt, a highly compressible soil that presents significant challenges for foundations.

For us, this is an important part of what makes the Tea House interesting. Its engineering ingenuity is embedded in its architecture. The monumental brick building appears incredibly solid and permanent, but that permanence was achieved through a very precise response to an unstable and challenging landscape. For many years, the Tea House was one of the tallest buildings outside Melbourne’s CBD and became a landmark on the southern bank of the Yarra. More than 139 years later, it is still standing.

That history changes how we think about its future. We are not simply working with an old building that needs to be preserved. We are working with a building that has already demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to respond to change and challenge.

Today, its monumental brick form sits within a Southbank characterised by much larger buildings of steel, concrete and glass. It remains distinctive, although the scale of development around it has diminished its former prominence.

Our response places the heritage building at the heart of a series of interconnected built forms. The development is organised around the Tea House, allowing it to anchor the composition and regain a central role within the precinct.

Working with an existing building requires a precise understanding of how new architecture should meet it. Scale, proportion, materiality and distance determine how different periods of architecture coexist and retain their individual presence. At the Tea House, these relationships allow the heritage building to define the identity of the wider development.

Reading culture, history and memory

Originally occupied by a printing fi rm and manufacturing stationer, The Tea House later became a storage facility for the Robur Tea Company. As industries disappeared and the precinct was progressively remade, the building endured.

That continuity has given the Tea House a particular signifi cance within Melbourne. Its brick walls hold a familiarity that has accumulated over generations. It is a reminder that while cities change, fragments of earlier stories remain present.

Heritage value emerges from the relationship between physical fabric and collective memory. Understanding that relationship helps identify which qualities are fundamental to a building's identity and how those qualities might remain evident as the building continues to evolve.

The cultural history of the site also extends well beyond the building itself. The Tea House stands on the southern bank of the Birrarung on the lands of the Bunurong people of the Kulin Nation. Long before Southbank became an industrial precinct, this was a landscape of wetlands, river flats, sand ridges and tea-tree scrub.

Recognising these deeper histories changes our understanding of the site. It situates the Tea House within a much longer story of country, ecology and human occupation. It

reminds us that every place has multiple layers and that architecture sits within a continuum that extends far beyond any individual building or development.

For us, understanding these histories is not only an act of acknowledgement. It also invites us to consider how design can contribute to the ecological future of a place. In highly urbanised parts of Melbourne such as Southbank, opportunities exist to reintroduce elements of landscape that have largely disappeared from the city, strengthening biodiversity, improving habitat and restoring a richer relationship between people and nature.

Landscape architecture plays an important role in this process. Through planting design, habitat creation, water-sensitive approaches and the integration of green public spaces, development can help reconnect people with the ecological systems that have shaped a place over thousands of years. While we cannot recreate the landscapes that once existed along the Birrarung, we can create new opportunities for urban ecology to flourish and for people to experience a closer connection to Country.

Reading experience

For Snøhetta, understanding a place also requires attention to how it is experienced. Arrival, movement, thresholds and atmosphere shape people’s relationship with architecture and influence whether they feel invited to enter, explore and stay.

The Tea House occupies a prominent site at the western end of Southbank, close to the Birrarung promenade and the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Yet the building is currently largely dormant, and successive waves of development have obscured its former prominence. Despite its proximity to some of Melbourne’s most active public destinations, it has a limited role in the everyday life and movement of the precinct.

Above: The Tea House occupies a prominent site at the western end of Southbank, close to the Birrarung promenade and the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre / Supplied.

This existing condition informed our ambition to open the site and draw public life through it. A new garden forecourt will establish a stronger relationship between the Tea House, the river promenade and the Convention and Exhibition Centre. From there, publicly accessible spaces will rise through the development in a sequence of terraces, connecting the ground plane with landscaped rooftops.

Hotel, workplace, hospitality and retail uses will bring different patterns of activity to the precinct throughout the day. As people move through it, they will encounter the Tea House from changing perspectives and experience the heritage building as an active part of the site.

This network of public spaces is therefore fundamental to how the project works. It creates new paths through the precinct, supports places to gather and allows the Tea House to be experienced through movement and occupation. This transition from a largely dormant landmark to the centre of an active public setting is fundamental to its next life.

Designing the next layer

Every project adds a new layer to an existing story.

Our role as architects is not to start that story nor to preserve it unchanged. It is to understand what has come before, engage with the realities of the present, and imagine what the future could become. By reflecting on the past, responding to contemporary needs and aspirations, and anticipating future possibilities, we can contribute to a continuing narrative that enriches rather than diminishes the qualities that give a place meaning.

At the Tea House, this has meant looking beyond the conservation of a nineteenth-century warehouse to consider the role it might play within Melbourne's evolving urban fabric. While its heritage significance provides an important foundation, its future relevance will be defined by the life and activity it can support in the city today and tomorrow.

Its architecture and history form the starting point. New buildings, landscapes and public spaces create opportunities for people to enter the site, spend time there, connect with one another and develop their own relationship with the place. In doing so, the Tea House becomes more than a preserved artefact of the past. It becomes an active participant in the ongoing life of the city.

The Tea House remains what it has always been, a marker of its time, while continuing to evolve alongside the city around it. The challenge and opportunity of architecture is to contribute a new layer that is grounded in what came before, responsive to the present, and optimistic about what comes next. By doing so, we help create places that remain relevant, meaningful and resilient for generations to come.

Main image: Snøhetta Australasia Managing Director Gumji Kang / Supplied.

Architecture & Design Team

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