Acre Artarmon is a sprawling farm-to-table restaurant, café, bar, bakery and events space, on Sydney’s Lower North Shore that has the design aesthetic of a greenhouse. Dubbed an ‘urban farm’, Acre specialises in growing the food it serves on site. 

Its indoor and outdoor productive gardens feature local and exotic fruit trees, a kitchen garden, vertical plantings and hydroponic growing systems, planted pergolas, picnic style areas, a kids’ playground and chicken coop.  

HDR was engaged by the landlord, Fortius as the architect for the base build, as well as the service engineer. We were also engaged by the tenant, restaurant owner Tully Heard, to provide service engineering within the 400-seat restaurant and associated spaces. 

The glass-encased restaurant sits within the HomeHQ Homemaker Centre, and our design brief was to create a site that fits harmoniously within the complex. This required converting an existing car park into the new dining precinct, which our services engineers and the project’s construction team, executed while the site was still busy hosting shoppers. 

As services engineer, our goal was to translate the architectural designs into a high-performing, cost-effective building for landlord and tenant, that would also provide visitors a comfortable and enjoyable experience.