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. Ornate vaulted ceilings disappeared behind suspended acoustic tiles and humming fluorescent strips. By the 1980s, the airy sandstone palace had become a cheerless maze of beige linoleum and grey metal filing cabinets. Under-maintained and technologically obsolete, the building had fully transitioned from one of the colony’s architectural prides to a draughty white elephant. But that’s not the end of the story. On Friday, the building, which served as the engine room of New South Wales’ colonial expansion for more than a century, took out one of the top gongs at the 2026 National Trust (NSW) heritage awards. The sandstone pile, built in the 1870s and long closed to the public, has been reimagined as a high-end lifestyle and cultural precinct, in a major project by Hassell as the lead design architect, with Purcell Architecture, providing the specialist heritage conservation. …