Solid timber at the heart of RAA City

Some projects you finish, hand over and move on to the next. Others end up on the walk-to-work route, where you can stand in the lobby years later and point at the joinery. RAA City is one of the second kind.

When the RAA made the move from Mile End to its new home at 150 Grenfell Street, it wasn't just relocating an office. The building brings the state's largest member organisation into the heart of the city, with workspaces for its corporate team alongside a café, flagship retail shop, travel services and heritage displays open to the public. It's also chasing a serious sustainability benchmark, aiming to become South Australia's first upfront carbon neutral certified office building.

Sakar Constructions was engaged by Schiavello to deliver the solid timber package for the fit-out: glazed timber partitions, timber-framed windows, door framing and installation, timber and aluminium skirting, hardware supply and the sundry items that make a workplace actually work. It's a builder we know well. After delivering at 97 Currie Street together, the working relationship with Schiavello has become one of the closest on our books, and it showed in how this job ran.

Timber and glass, shaping the floor plate

The centrepiece of our scope was the solid timber glazed partitions, fabricated in our own workshop from American oak and American walnut. Across the RAA floors, these partitions do the quiet structural work of a modern workplace, carving open floor plates into the spaces people actually use: lift entries, meeting rooms and phone call rooms. The glazing runs floor to ceiling, so each room reads as a clean frame of timber and glass. Light moves through the whole floor, and the oak does the talking.

The two timbers earned their places for different reasons. Walnut is the softer of the pair, easier to drill and sand, which suits it to detailed feature work. The oak is the workhorse, handsome enough for show and hardwearing enough for everyday use.

Some of the internal partition runs stretched to around 12 metres in a single length.

Assembling pieces of that size on a live construction floor is a genuine feat of sequencing, handling and patience, and it pays off the moment they stand. A 12 metre run of solid timber and glass changes how a floor feels and retains visibility while creating individual spaces separate from one another. 

Fabricated here, built to be craned

Working in natural timber raises the stakes. There's no paint to hide behind. The architects wanted a smooth, natural finish where the timber itself is the feature, which meant significant effort went into sourcing and selecting stock. Smaller units were delivered to site fully assembled, while the larger pieces were fabricated in kit form so they could be craned up to the floor and assembled in place.

When the details get tested

Every project throws up a moment where coordination matters more than anything else. Ours came before a single piece had left the workshop, when the glazing contractor flagged that the window rebates needed more depth for their glass. With the builder, glazier and architect all in the conversation, we re-fabricated the rebate depths and had the revised units ready without touching the site schedule, which is the benefit of our team being behind the fabrication. Having our workshop minutes from the job meant a change to the architect's detail could happen immediately rather than joining a queue. It's the kind of problem that gets expensive when your fabrication happens somewhere else, and you don’t even notice when it’s handled well. 

Doors built to be noticed

The door package ran from standard MDF doors through to solid timber doors and frames, and pre-finished veneer timber doors with high acoustic ratings for the spaces where privacy counts: meeting rooms, the boardroom and the CEO's office. These doors are features in their own right, with American walnut bringing a richness to the boardroom and CEO's office that sets those rooms apart the moment you reach for the handle. Colour matching veneer to solid timber is famously unforgiving, and getting the two to sit together took care in ordering and selection.

Nothing wasted

Natural timber carries its own sustainability story, and we added to it. Every length delivered from our supplier was reviewed for framing suitability, and stock that wasn’t selected for that application was cut down for skirting and re-used. Offcuts and waste went back to the supplier for re-use. On a building targeting a carbon neutral certification, it felt right that the joinery package pulled in the same direction.

The team behind it

At peak, four of our team were on site, backed by the workshop crew and a steady back-and-forth between the two that kept fabrication and installation in lockstep. The project was a first for Sakar at this scale and pace, and it became a skill-builder, particularly for apprentices Arif and Calum, who got exposure to solid timber fabrication and installation on a landmark commercial job.

Site supervisor Luke summed it up best: "It was my first time working with timber partitions at this scale, and I really enjoyed it. Because it's natural, it doesn't get painted over. You take the care, then you step back, look at it and think, I put that there."

From first fabrication in late November to practical completion in July, the RAA City package pushed our timeframes, our sourcing and our coordination. The building is now open, the timber is on show to every member who walks in, and it will stay that way.

That's the point of working in solid timber. The care is permanent.