From drab partitions to haute couture host: how a Sydney civic masterpiece was rescued

It was once a grand old sandstone masterpiece, where returned soldiers would cram into marble corridors to anxiously await lottery draws that could change their lives. Then the 20th century happened. As the bureaucracy swelled, the interior Victorian grandeur of the Department of Lands building on Sydney’s Bridge Street became infested with a warren of claustrophobic cubicles. Office partitions sprang up like weeds, hiding grand Australian red cedar joinery behind particleboard. …