A BOUTIQUE Hotel, a suspended pool, apartments, commercial space, two storeys of retail, bars and restaurants – Lonsdale Street in Braddon will be unrecognisable once architect and designer Erin Hinton has her hands on it.

“I could go on for hours about it,” she says. “I love it!”

Erin, 31, landed her dream job last year, when she was chosen to design a six-storey mixed-use building on the 14,000sqm block that currently accommodates businesses from Thrifty Car Rentals to Cafe Bamboo on Lonsdale Street owned by Nik Bulum.

“People love Braddon already, so it was saying: okay, it’s because the street is a great scale, the trees dominate, it has a nice feel to it,” she says.

“It doesn’t have a mall feel. It doesn’t have a consistent glass facade where everything looks the same. It doesn’t have signage that has to conform.

“And that’s what we love about it. We wanted to keep that.”

Erin, who owns her own design business Hinton, brought on board another local architect Nathan Gibson Judd to take on the project.

“We are working with Nik Bulum, who is one of the younger directors of B & T Construction,” she said.

“He is only a few years older than I and the great thing about that is he has given me a complete licence to do something completely different, at the moment, without any restrictions. Other than planning regulations, of course.”

She said the designs have been with ACTPLA for about eight months, but appear to be close to being approved.

Her design will see the building retain its two storeys on the street side with six storeys towards the back of the block.

One of the big features of the building will include an eight-metre void that will act as a “promenade street”.

“You walk into that void and you can see things happening on all six levels and they can all look down to you,” she says.

Within the void there will be a concrete podium featuring three by three-metre cubes, which will feature work of local artists, including one computer-generated piece that changes colours and patterns depending on how much activity is happening in the building at the time.

“From the very beginning, we put a lot of focus into not making it feel like it’s this slab of built form,” she says.

“Lonsdale Street has a really beautiful scale at the moment and we were very conscious from the start that we wanted to maintain that scale.

“The other thing we wanted to do, was make sure that we didn’t max the block out and build right up to the frontage the whole way.

“There were to be a lot of shops in it, but they are articulated so they are on different planes.

“So some are up back, some are short, some are tall, you get that kind of ad hoc feel that Braddon has at the moment.”

Retail will also run along different little alley ways into the building plus on the second storey.

“We wanted to make sure that wherever you were, there was business and grittiness and activity,” she said. “Not just glass facade.”

Erin is also an associate professor of architecture and the interior architecture course convener at University of Canberra.

Her work through the university helped her found the design collective called Faculty.

Their work can be seen in the local cafe, Two before Ten, that drew together UC design graduates to design everything from the stools to the artwork.

With her Lonsdale Street project close to approval, Erin is now starting new projects with the Molonglo Group’s NewACTON and 221 developments.

“It’s super unusual, in all honesty with someone with my level of experience and of my age to be working on a building of that scale it’s a dream job,” she says.