This boutique commercial building sits at the corner of McLachlan and Morgan streets, adjacent to St Patrick’s Church. Our clients, Pellegrino Group Australia (PGA) and Mosaic Property Group, sought to create a beautiful and distinctive office building on the city-fringe to be held as a long term asset. PGA saw value in creating high-quality communal and outdoor spaces as a means of attracting high quality tenants. The building promotes interaction between different tenants by offering opportunities to step away from the desk to work outside in Brisbane’s enviable sub-tropical climate. As long-term owners of the building, PGA and Mosaic also aspired to pursue best-practice sustainability and longevity outcomes. Building on our client’s aspirations, the scheme was conceived as a small but valuable ‘gem’, and our intent was to intertwine sub-tropical landscaping and sheltered outdoor communal spaces to create an oasis in a harsh urban environment. The project has been customised to meet a combination of Nabers, Green Star and PCA A-grade environmental requirements. A stone-clad base containing a restaurant and retail is topped with a chiselled, glass clad volume accommodating 6000m2 of office space across 5 stories. The upper volume is sloped at its ends in deference to its smaller and significant neighbours, particularly the vista to St Patrick’s Church. Habitable external spaces are carved out of these two simple volumes, allowing articulated landscaped balconies on the upper stories, communal space and landscaping on the street and a significant street tree at the primary corner. Folded, perforated metal screening to the east and west shades the glazing and captures the landscaped balconies in a tall, narrow atrium-like space – external, yet protected and semi-private. Visual and aural connection between the offset balconies creates a sense of community between the tenants of the building. The screen perforations create changing patterns of light and shade, and city views are framed with concrete portals. Planting cascades down the building from the balconies, intertwining with the screen, and through openings in the concrete awning to the ground floor planters. The scheme is crowned with a large, landscaped communal rooftop terrace. The external landscaped spaces are much-loved for meetings, quiet working and socialising. The scheme won the 2021 Brisbane Lord Mayor’s Buildings that Breathe Architecture Prize, and received a Commendation in the 2021 AIA Brisbane Regional Architecture Awards. The Eminence is a model for smaller, sustainable, sub-tropical commercial architecture in Brisbane.