Doubling Up At Remarkables Park

Media Release from Remarkables Park Ltd

July 8 2010

Expansion Programme Underway At Remarkables Park Will More Than Double Size Of Remarkables Park Town Centre

The next stage of major development at Queenstown’s Remarkables Park Town Centre is well underway and will more than double the size of the existing centre.

Work started in early May on the extraction of 177,000 cubic metres of dirt on five hectares of land alongside the existing centre. The work is being undertaken by Fulton Hogan to provide fill as part of the Queenstown Airport Corporation’s runway extension works.

The dig out in this location will bring the land down to the level of existing stores to enable a seamless transition between established and new buildings.

Five large format stores ranging from 1500sqm to 6,000sqm in size are planned for the site. The site will also house 1,000 car park spaces to add to the existing 800 at the shopping centre, and staff and tertiary student accommodation.

Remarkables Park Ltd director Alastair Porter said they were in discussions with a number of national stores not yet represented in Queenstown.

“Our goal is to continue to expand Remarkables Park as a one-stop shopping and service destination bringing even more choice and greater affordability to Queenstown,” he said.

Remarkables Park Ltd is in the process of planning buildings for resource consent applications. “There’s no reason why some of these stores couldn’t start building in 2011,” he said.

Remarkables Park town centre currently has 24 retail stores and 19 businesses operating from office tenancies, providing jobs for approximately 350 people.

Mr Porter said the student and staff accommodation was planned to provide an outer perimeter on the eastern boundary of the Town Centre expansion area. This accommodation is designed to cater for increasing numbers of tertiary students at the Southern Institute of Technology campus and employment growth.

“We expect we will need accommodation for at least 500 tertiary students and staff working at Remarkables Park within three to four years,” said Mr Porter.

“This will include staff housing for future approved public facilities such as the retirement village, hospital and other public amenities.”

Mr Porter said the architecture for all the new landscaping and buildings would be carefully designed to complement and enhance Remarkables Park as a high quality second town centre for Queenstown.

“If anything we’ll be striving to do an even better landscaping job with further emphasis on fully integrated pedestrian and community amenities,” he said.

The new stores and multi storey accommodation units will be accessed via an extension of Hawthorne Drive leading to a new entry road called Red Oaks Drive. The new road will access the next stage of development at the Remarkables Quay Resort Village, on the banks of the Kawarau River looking up to The Remarkables mountain range.

The Remarkables Park Town Centre extension will also be able to be accessed in the future via the new Eastern Access Road joining onto Hawthorne Drive. Traffic experts say of the 1.5 million vehicles per year currently accessing Remarkables Park, half a million of those vehicles will access the Centre more easily by coming around the Eastern Access Road.

The Town Centre is already expanding with work well underway on a new building from DNZ Property Group Ltd, which manages the existing centre. The 1,100sqm building will house a number of new retail outlets including a Whitcoulls stationery store, a new design store called Mooch, and The Coffee Club, and is expected to officially open at Labour weekend.

The town centre expansion area, when complete, will add a further 26,000sqm of retail to Remarkables Park, making the total centre a similar size to Queenstown’s downtown CBD.

ends

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