Chinamans Beach

Project completed by Urban Escape in 2012.

This incredible landscape by Urban Escape in Chinamans Beach underwent construction in 2010 through to mid 2012. The brief from the client was to provide access from the house to the boatshed via a steeply sloping site using Sydney sandstone, incorporating a colourful and interesting plant palette which is also hardy and low maintenance.

Achieving this required extensive sandstone works from curved walling, stairs and retaining walls, beautiful paving and a sea wall restoration and extension.

Plants included many super advanced trees from hand selected Australian Bottle Trees, Frangipanis and transplanted Kentia Palms, with a native under-story selection of Agave, Kangaroo Paw, Carpobrotus, Doryanthes, Lomandra, Phormium, Westringia and more.

Site access was the biggest challenge faced with only 1m wide access from the street and barge access from the waterfront level. The extremely steep site also made it very difficult to manoeuvre machinery and transport materials with two full time staff employed simply to move material around the site ready for the tradesmen to utilise. The biggest challenge arose when the super advanced trees needed installation and, with no conceivable way of getting them through the street or water level access points, a helicopter was deployed to lower them into position.

Alpine are proud to have supplied this project and to see it go on to win the Gold Award, Residential over $300K and also the Graham Ross Residential Award at the LNA Annual Awards night, proudly presented by Peter Knox & Michael Slater.