Kardinya's $100m new town centre

Shopping centre owner-developer Con Berbatis has unveiled a $100 million-plus plan to redevelop Kardinya Park Shopping Centre, with preliminary designs calling for apartments, a cinema and a comprehensive suite of food and beverage and recreational facilities.

Mr Berbatis recently appointed architecture firm Hames Sharley and planning firm Element to create design concepts for Kardinya Park, which currently has around 13,000 square metres of retail space and is anchored by a Coles supermarket and a Kmart department store.

Concept plans suggest that retail space will double to more than 26,000sqm, while the shopping facilities could be complemented by entertainment and recreational facilities such as a cinema, a swimming pool, a rock-climbing facility, and a comprehensive food and beverage precinct.

Mr Berbatis said the exact makeup of the entertainment and leisure component, as well as the apartments aspect, would be finalised throughout the planning process, but the aim would be to create a new town centre for Kardinya.

The Kardinya Park plan will be presented to the City of Melville design review panel this week, with a formal development application expected to be lodged in early December.

Prior to DA lodgement, Mr Berbatis said the project team would engage closely with the local community to help shape the recreational and shopping aspects of the development.

“This centre will be a new generation shopping centre,” Mr Berbatis told Business News.

“A lot of things have happened to retail, and of course the big development has been the emergence of online shopping.

“Shopping centres these days need to adopt a number of models, what you have got to do is slip into things that aren’t so available on the internet. Food and beverage is an obvious one.

“Secondly, we have got to look very carefully at shopping centres becoming more family and community oriented. It’s remodelling shopping centres a lot.”

Mr Berbatis, who until this year had a long-running partnership with private developer George Atzemis, said inspiration for the centre’s redevelopment came from new shopping centre builds on Australia’s east coast and in the US.

He said he was keeping his options open on the multi-residential component, with the possibility of selling the rights to develop apartments to another developer, entering a joint venture, or engaging with the aged care sector.

“We knew about three or four years ago that the centre had residential potential,” Mr Berbatis said.

“The City of Melville has been very encouraging. On sites like this, which have large expanses of land, local councils are happy to consider height and apartments.

“And you have local demand there as well, because east of the shopping centre you have got Murdoch University, which has around 2,200 staff and more than 17,000 students.

“Then you have the Fiona Stanley Hospital complex, which has 9,000 staff, so we are looking at catering for them.”