Victoria Lane Apartments

The 2016 Kaikōura earthquake left Wellington cautious about tall buildings in the central city. Willis Bond's response was apartments people could live in with confidence through a major quake, on a site in the Cuba Precinct bounded by Victoria, Dixon and Cuba Streets.

Victoria Lane Apartments put 123 apartments on the upper floors over offices and ground-floor retail. The building sits on base isolators and is braced by a diagrid frame, designed to withstand a one-in-1,000-year earthquake.

RCP managed the development for Willis Bond from resource consent and early design through to completion. Construction began in August 2020, around the first COVID lockdown, into a market of stretched supply and uncertain pricing. To hold the programme, RCP built the case for committing early, ordering the structural steel and the base isolators before final prices were settled. When materials ran short, RCP worked with the contractor to source them from overseas and get them approved for use here.

RCP also coordinated a staged consent and completion strategy so the apartments could be certified and settled ahead of the commercial floors, which shared the same consent. Homeowners could move in without waiting on the rest of the building.

Victoria Lane was Wellington's first base-isolated apartment development, part of the wider Cuba Precinct regeneration.