Architect’s Resurrection of Ararat Shoptop Points Way to Regional Reinvigoration

Covid lockdowns did strange things to people. For architect Adam Haddow, pandemic isolation and a night of “too much wine” saw him drop $300,000 in an online auction. The SJB principal and national president of the Australian Institute of Architects suddenly owned a “tiny, tiny” derelict shoptop in the main street of his hometown, Ararat, in Victoria. It was an impulse—a “purchase of the heart”—but one which has since delivered something rare in Australia, emerging as a practical, replicable model for unlocking housing stock and reinvigorating shopping strips outside the capitals. At 120 Barkly Street, Haddow has restored the long-vacant building, bringing an uninhabitable upstairs apartment back into use and reopening two ground-floor shops, both now leased. ▲ The site on the Ararat main street, 120 Barkly Street, on the right of the Ararat Hotel, after the shoptop was restored. Two terrace homes are under construction at the rear of the site. For Haddow, the building was never anonymous. Decades earlier, he spent Friday nights leaning against its cool brick walls, enjoying the smell of fish and chips cooking inside the long, narrow shop. By the time the building resurfaced during lockdown, it had sat dormant for close to a decade. The upstairs apartment was derelict and unoccupied. The ground-floor shops were closed. “There was the one apartment upstairs but no one was living in it, it was gross,” Haddow says. “You could barely get to it. The staircase itself was almost collapsed.” ▲ Before restoration, one uninhabitable unit sat above the two ageing retail spaces on Barkly Street. The condition is familiar well beyond Ararat. “I think there’s so much in regional towns where you’ve got old high streets that have shoptop housing,” he says. “Lots of them still exist even though they’re not inhabited.” At Barkly Street, the starting point was modest. “Yep. Two shops downstairs and one apartment upstairs,” Haddow says. “And the next phase, which is still under construction, is two three-bedroom terrace houses.” Why this matters now What began as a personal investment has become a live test case for housing delivery outside the capitals. Ararat, a town of about 8300 people, sits under growing pressure. Real Estate Investar data shows rental vacancy rates below 1 per cent, with limited stock and rising competition among tenants. Job vacancies have climbed sharply since 2020, leaving employers struggling to house staff. ▲ Adam Haddow, whose childhood in Ararat shaped his return to the town to revive a long-vacant shoptop on its main street. Haddow says the local hospital now rents about 40 houses across the township for its workforce, competing directly with residents for ageing supply. Despite those pressures, new housing delivery continues to push outward. Haddow took the opposite approach, working within the town centre, where infrastructure and services were already in place. The question now is whether the Ararat approach can scale nationally. “I think that what is really needed, and we’ve been talking about that in my role as the president of the institute for a while ... are two things,” Haddow says. “The first one is to appoint a Federal Government architect because if you want to make something like this happen and get the scale, you need design thinking happening in the regions.” In practice, Haddow says the role could help councils do upfront heritage and compliance work once at a street or precinct level. On the Barkly Street project, heritage and disability compliance added cost and complexity well beyond the construction itself. “We had to go through a reporting mechanism to make sure that from a heritage point of view we didn’t require DDA access,” Haddow says. ▲ Living areas within the former shoptop bring light and amenity back above the main street. He argues councils could remove much of this friction by preparing shared heritage strategies for entire streets, rather than forcing each owner to commission their own reports. “They could do some things like have a heritage strategy in place for the street so that individual land owners didn’t have to go and do their own heritage strategy,” he says. The second lever sits in building regulation. Haddow argues the National Construction Code needs to better distinguish small, lowrise apartments from larger, more complex buildings, with simpler requirements for lower-scale projects. “We need to reimagine the National Construction Code, particularly around Class 2 buildings,” he says. “We need to split it into two different types, the kind of lower-scale under six storeys, and then anything above six storeys.” A building he already knew Unlike other bidders in the pandemic auction, Haddow was not speculating on an unfamiliar asset. His parents still live in Ararat, along with his brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew. Family visits remain regular. The main street is familiar. ▲ A balcony added to the restored apartment, overlooking Ararat’s main street. When the property came up for auction, this familiarity sharpened his resolve. “There were a few other people online but no one else from Ararat,” Haddow says. “That kind of spurred me on even more because I actually think it’s important regional communities have a say in what’s happening to them.” He suspected other bidders were chasing yield rather than renewal. “You don’t want it to end up with people buying buildings, renting them out, keeping them shitty and not investing ... just slumlords, in a way,” he says. What it took to deliver The Barkly Street site spans 260sq m, with a gross floor area of about 230 square metres. The existing two-storey building stands about 8m high, split evenly between retail and residential use. Restoration proved harder than expected. “It was way more dilapidated than I thought it was,” Haddow says. “We had to do a lot of restoration of the brickwork and of the footings and the floors.” ▲ The kitchen-dining area, where contemporary joinery sits alongside exposed brick from the original building. Parts of the original building had never been formally recorded. “When you kind of stripped back the 1940s Art Deco, you could then find the 1800s Victorian pub,” he says. Trades became another constraint. “There’s a complete lack of tradespeople in regional Australia,” Haddow says. “You’re often paying the same commercial rates that you’re paying in Sydney.” The project only moved forward after securing a regional builder with deep local trade networks. Living in Sydney, Haddow relied on trust and remote oversight, often managing progress through site visits via FaceTime. Construction finished early last year. Both ground-floor shops are now leased—one to a Pilates studio, the other to a wedding and events business. The apartment above is complete, with strong demand. “It’s great having people there because you just see more people come to the main street early in the morning, which then has a flow-on effect to the cafe up the street,” Haddow says. “You can see people are starting to repaint their shops and where there were empty shops they’ve started to clean them out and put them up for lease.” For Haddow, the project was never about short-term return. &ldquo;Does it make financial sense yet? Probably not yet,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;But it will definitely make sense soon.&rdquo; --> The shoptop question The lesson runs beyond one site. “There’s no housing diversity in somewhere like Ararat,” Haddow says. “The only choice of house you’d get is a house on a block.” ▲ Inside the bathroom, part of the adaptive reuse of the long-vacant apartment. This default response pushes long-term cost on to councils. “It’s cheaper in the short term,” he says. “But in the long term all that does is make council have to extend their garbage services and extend water, and extend sewer, and extend public services.” Main streets already carry infrastructure and daily life. “You look down the main street and the thing that you see at the end of the street is a paddock,” Haddow says. “What you don’t want to see is endless numbers of big housing. “Is it directly replicable? Yes,” Haddow says. “Does it make financial sense yet? Probably not yet but it will definitely make sense soon.”

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