A shed that got a little bit tipsy.
Old Young's had outgrown its home. Since 2016, the Swan Valley distiller had built a loyal following for its gin and vodka, won national acclaim, and pushed into wholesale, hospitality and events - all from a modest facility that could no longer keep up. When they acquired a 4.5-hectare riverside site on the Swan River at Henley Brook, the ambition was clear: a landmark new distillery, restaurant, tasting rooms, function spaces and short-stay accommodation that would put Old Young's on the international spirits tourism map.
We won the invited design competition with a concept we called the Tipsy Shed. The building takes the simplest form in the Australian landscape - a rural shed - and gives it a twist. Literally. As the shed expanded to house Old Young's growing program, its form shifted and contorted, producing a building that is bold, irreverent and unmistakably its own. To some it reads as a vernacular structure that got happily upside-down after one too many gins. To others it recalls something older - a form emerging from the landscape like the Wagyl, the Dreamtime serpent that carved out the Swan River below. We liked that it could be both.
A living distillery lab.
The design concentrated the working distillery within a straightforward shed structure, freeing the visitor-facing spaces to do the expressive work. The experience was built around a sequence of curated moments from arrival to departure - tastings, dining, tours through the production floor, views into the still room and barrel store, and outdoor spaces that connected to the river landscape and a restored eastern bank. The landscape design by Aspect Studio split the site into two characters: a structured, botanical arrival on the western side inspired by the juniper and native ingredients used in Old Young's gin, and a rewilded eastern edge that worked with the seasonally flooded riverbank to rehabilitate native habitat.
Sustainability was embedded at every level - passive solar design, closed-loop distillation heat recovery, on-site renewable energy, waste-to-resource systems and a commitment to low-embodied-energy materials. The Tipsy Shed concept was designed to be scalable, allowing the building to grow in phases as the business expanded. The project did not proceed beyond the competition stage, but the thinking behind it - a building as synonymous with its brand as the spirit inside - remains an idea we believe in.
