Commercial and industrial
Commercial and industrial design
Warehouses, fit-outs, change of use, childcare and medical. Practical buildings, documented so they get approved and then built.
Commercial and industrial work turns on a different question from residential. On a house, the question is what envelope the controls allow. Here, the first question is what the use is called — because the land use definition in the LEP decides permissibility, and permissibility decides whether there is a project at all.
Get the classification wrong and everything downstream is wasted. A tenancy that reads as a café might be food and drink premises, or it might be a neighbourhood shop with a floor area cap attached to the definition. Those are different answers in the same zone.
What we work on
Change of use
New use in an existing building or tenancy. The most common commercial job, and the one where permissibility is most often assumed rather than established.
Change of use →Industrial buildings
Warehouses, factories, industrial units and estates — new buildings, additions and fit-outs.
Industrial design →Childcare and medical
Early education centres and medical fit-outs, where a body of design standards drives the layout before the planning controls get a say.
Childcare and medical →Fit-outs and alterations
Internal reconfiguration, tenancy works, shopfronts and signage — where a change of BCA classification often matters more than the planning.
How a fit-out is assessed →The pathway
Most commercial and industrial work is a development application. There is a complying development route — the Commercial and Industrial Alterations Code for changes of use and limited alterations, and the commercial and industrial code for new buildings and additions within its standards — but the limits are tighter than people expect, and a parking shortfall, a change of hours, a BCA classification change or external works beyond the code will take a project to a DA.
We confirm the code limits before relying on the fast route, rather than lodging a CDC that comes back.
What a commercial DA has to deal with
Residential assessment is mostly about built form. Commercial assessment is mostly about operation, and an application that only draws the building is only half an application:
- Car parking — demand for the new use against the DCP rate, and the parking credit already attributed to the existing use, which is frequently the difference between approval and refusal
- Hours of operation and amenity — noise, odour, light spill, patron behaviour, and how close the nearest residential boundary is
- Staffing and attendance — for an unstaffed or automated use, who attends, how often, and what for. Vagueness here invites refusal rather than a condition
- Mechanical ventilation — heat, moisture and odour, and where the exhaust discharges. Decisive for food premises, gyms, clinics and laundries
- Trade waste and wastewater — a separate water authority approval, not a council one
- Accessibility and BCA — a change of use commonly changes the building's classification, which triggers access, sanitary and fire safety upgrades
- Contamination — a sensitive use after an industrial one needs a contamination assessment under the Resilience and Hazards SEPP
- Signage — under the LEP and the Industry and Employment SEPP
We address these in the statement of environmental effects rather than leaving the assessing planner to raise them as a request for information three months in.
What we do
Classify the use and establish permissibility, pick the pathway, design the building or fit-out, and prepare the application with the operational content in it. Where a specialist is needed — traffic, acoustic, contamination, fire — we coordinate them.
Fee proposals for commercial work are scoped per project. Send the address and the proposed use and we'll come back with a fixed number.
Have a commercial site or a tenancy?
Send us the address and the proposed use. Classification and permissibility come first, and they're quick.