St Andrews Beach Brewery

St Andrews Beach Brewery required its first expansion beyond its home site, moving from Fingal on the Mornington Peninsula into the ground floor of the Centrepiece building at Melbourne Park. The project was won through a full tender submission and interview process. A brewery that has built its identity on a coastal location faces a specific problem when it goes to the city: the setting was doing a great deal of the work, and it cannot be brought along. The brief was to establish the brand in an urban venue without either pretending to be at the beach or abandoning what makes the brand recognisable.

Two conditions narrowed it further. Centrepiece had only been completed in 2021, so the kitchen, flooring, acoustic treatments and wall cladding were all to be retained, and the brand had to be established within a palette already set by someone else. Scale was the other. At 1,133 square metres the venue has to work across several modes at once, from a quick drink to a long table, and Melbourne Park’s own rhythm reinforces that, since a precinct built around events trades in surges rather than steadily.

The brand came across in one material rather than in motifs. Fingal’s signature rammed earth was reproduced two ways: real rammed earth on the bar front, and a rendering technique on the wall behind that reads as rammed earth without its structural weight or its cost. Separating the two finishes across the room lets them sit together instead of competing, and it establishes the brewery inside a palette it did not choose.

An eighteen metre bar anchors the plan, crowned with brass fonts pouring ten of the brewery’s beers, and it is split so that a cafe station can run independently of the main service. That is what allows one room to trade as morning coffee and as a post-event bar. A working microbrewery, the BrewKit, was fitted into a four and a half metre square footprint behind a banquette reworked into a viewing area, so the brewing is part of the room rather than back of house. The service load this implies, a 100 square metre cool room and the runs connecting it to bar and BrewKit, was threaded through the existing ceiling so the retained fabric stayed intact.

The result is St Andrews Beach Brewery’s first city venue, 1,133 square metres at Melbourne Park, awarded Silver at the 2025 Melbourne Design Awards and again at both the 2026 World Design Awards and the 2026 Australian Design Awards for Interior Design, Hospitality, Casual.

The venue reads as the same brewery in a setting that shares nothing with its original, and it does so while retaining most of a fit-out completed two years earlier.