Refurbishment and fitout of the entire Lower Ground (1,800m2) of iconic 388 George Street to create Locali by Romeo’s, a European-Inspired Food Hall. Locali is a new, unique concept, skillfully mixing traditional supermarket retail and hospitality. It has a walk-in cheese room, continental-style delicatessen, pizzeria, dine-in cafe and restaurant, sushi bar, stalls selling meat, fish, salami and nuts, an Italian bakery, florist and liquor store. The project also extended to the creation of all back of house areas, including cool rooms, freezer rooms, loading dock, office and public amenities.
The main store's floor plan encourages an intuitive circular flow. On diagonally opposite corners, a wine room and sushi station are positioned at an angle to gently nudge browsing customers back into the space. The floor is punctuated by cylindrical support columns, forming a robust structural curve to inform the shape of counters and motifs. In homage to heritage, all Locali signage is written in Italian.
The proper management of the procurement of material and equipment was essential to the success of this project, especially given the tight timeframe and the Christmas shutdown. A clear and concise construction program was professionally developed with all the subcontractors acknowledging the program.
By treating each food service area as discrete areas or subprojects, the works were tackled concurrently to ensure that the team met the design purpose and functionality of each area. Project commencement of each area was staggered to ensure trade roll on through the subprojects.
The project started by reticulating high level services throughout the entire floor space. This enabled the works to then progress through each discrete food service area.
Starting with areas having the highest volume of works (commercial kitchen and bar) ensured a head start on the more detailed and onerous areas. This allowed the critical path to progress in the most efficient manner in order to achieve the Client’s required completion date.
Challenges on site included; working within an existing building still under renovation, maintaining compliance with existing fire engineered requirements, COVID -19 requirements and co-ordinating delivery of custom equipment from Italy
The judges were impressed by the high standard of finish achieved in a very tight and restricted area, the end result of Locali, a new concept in retail, makes it a worthy winner.