Brisbane home lift turns heritage rule into childcare overhaul
Two old Brisbane houses have been hoisted into the air, and the move has done more than draw stares from passersby. It has opened a
Two old Brisbane houses have been hoisted into the air, and the move has done more than draw stares from passersby. It has opened a path around a council rule that protects pre-1946 homes from demolition.
The properties, in Bardon in Brisbane’s northwest, are believed to date to the 1940s and are being turned into a childcare centre. Raise My House, the construction company behind the job, kept both front facades intact while creating room underneath for a car park and adding new rooms at the back.
A lift, not a demolition
That approach mattered because the homes sit within a traditional building character overlay, a planning zone meant to preserve older streetscapes. Under that rule, owners cannot simply knock down an old house and replace it with a new build. So the builder raised the homes instead.
Operations manager Adam Seager told Yahoo News the approvals sat with council for more than two years because both houses had to be retained and nothing could be demolished. The result was unusual enough to stop people in their tracks early in construction, when the homes were lifted about nine metres into the air on stilts.
The sight was striking. Two weathered Queensland houses, suddenly stacked above the ground, with the old facades suspended like stage sets while work continued below. For nearby residents, it turned a planning dispute into a spectacle.
Why builders are paying attention
The project shows how developers and property owners can work within heritage-style restrictions without losing usable floor space. In this case, the answer was not to fight the rule head-on, but to design around it.
That kind of workaround matters in cities where councils are trying to keep familiar streetscapes while still allowing redevelopment. Brisbane is not alone in this balancing act. Across the world, heritage overlays and conservation rules often force builders to choose between preservation and practicality — and increasingly, the most expensive answer is the clever one.
For Raise My House, it also appears to have paid off. Seager described the job as a long process, but one that unlocked a very different kind of project from a straight knockdown-rebuild. The homes remain. The childcare centre is taking shape. And the unusual lift that made it all possible is likely to be remembered long after the stilts come down.
