Build-to-rent developer MODEL has won Victorian Government approval to stack 158 mass timber rental homes above and behind the 1886 Schweppes Cordial Factory in Melbourne’s Abbotsford, the first scheme the two-year-old developer has taken from plan to permit. That is according to a report published on Friday, which revealed that the $120 million heritage conversion will now go ahead.
Approval in hand, MODEL will raise a multi-level mass timber extension across 14,000 square metres of floor space, with 1 in 10 apartments set aside for affordable housing. The scheme comes in smaller and dearer than the 180 homes at $110 million MODEL announced when it secured the site in late 2024.
Designed by Warren and Mahoney with engineering by Arup and TTW, the Passivhaus-certified conversion targets a 6-Star Green Star rating, a 9-Star NatHERS rating, and net-zero operational emissions. Mass timber carries the carbon case, halving embodied emissions compared with a conventional build.
Standing since 1886 as the Schweppes Cordial Factory, the two-storey brick complex served as headquarters of the James Richardson Group for half a century before its owners listed it in February 2024. MODEL bought the 3,098-square-metre site in November in a deal brokered by JLL.
“Breathing new life into such a historically significant site is incredibly exciting,” Rory Hunter, founder and chief executive of MODEL, said on securing the factory. A World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, Hunter has promised more than 5,000 mass timber apartments across Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane, and raised the group’s Regenerative Decarbonisation Fund target from $250 million to $600 million.
Across the suburb, MODEL is running two projects at once, after signing tier one builder Multiplex in April to build both under a combined $330 million contract. Five hundred metres away, MODEL on Johnston will climb 17 storeys in cross-laminated timber to become Australia’s tallest residential timber building, with 200 apartments of its own.
It comes as the Victorian Government pushes density into inner Melbourne, releasing draft maps in February that would allow towers of up to 20 storeys around 50 train and tram activity centres. Abbotsford sits squarely inside that plan, and MODEL argues that cross-laminated timber can build the extra homes faster and better than concrete.
First floated in 2024 as Australia’s first purpose-built build-to-rent group, MODEL has since drawn backing from industry heavyweights, including a former Cbus chief financial officer recruited to steer its national rollout. Hunter claims sustainable rentals can command premiums of 5 to 10 per cent, strengthening returns over a seven-year hold.
Construction is expected to start before the end of the year, putting the first 158 homes of Hunter’s 5,000-apartment pipeline behind a façade that has stood on Lithgow Street since 1886.
