A mid-century hall, carefully reimagined for its next life.
Lodge Heather began as a Masonic Hall in 1952 - a solid, precise building on a prominent Newstead corner, designed by Roy Smith, Willing & Newman. Over the decades it served its community quietly, but by the time the client came to us, the building had been dormant for years. The brief is to bring it back - not as a museum piece, but as a working office and community space that can carry the building forward with purpose.
The hall's Post-War International style gives it a directness we want to respect - sharp brickwork, a monumental corner presence, and a formality that still reads clearly from the street. A later addition from the 1980s, with no heritage significance, will be removed and replaced with a considered new volume to the west. It will house the amenities and meeting spaces the building needs to function as a modern workplace, while sitting quietly alongside the original hall - clearly contemporary, deliberately secondary. From the principal corner of Penquite Road and Robin Street, the building will read as it always has.
Inside, the deep plan and limited windows present a genuine challenge for office use. Rather than forcing the existing openings to do more than they were designed for, we will lower a number of sills to improve the connection between inside and out, while keeping the rhythm and proportions of the original fenestration intact. New dormer skylights will bring natural light into the first floor without disrupting the roofline from the street.
A living layer, not just a green one.
The most visible new element will be a lightweight elevated walkway wrapping the first floor - a transparent structure planted with indigenous Tasmanian species, including Billardiera. It will be fixed only to mortar joints and non-significant surfaces, designed to be entirely reversible.
It will do several things at once. For the people working here, it will provide shaded outdoor space, fresh air, and a reason to step away from a screen. For the building, it will temper the thermal mass of all that brick - reducing heat gain and the reliance on mechanical cooling. For the street, it will add a layer of green that softens the masonry without concealing it.
The indigenous planting is climate-resilient and low-water, and will create habitat for native birds, insects and small mammals that still move through suburban Launceston. The walkway becomes a quiet ecological contribution - a small corridor of biodiversity on a prominent corner. It is an approach grounded in how we believe heritage buildings can participate in the present: not frozen in time, but adapted with care, doing more than they did before.
