Apartments at old loft site

‘We’re going down two floors and recycling the limestone for sub-base used for roads build and temporary roads,’ Dempsey-Gillespie Construction director Drew Gillespie said.

Fremantle Council approved the 14,000sqm project several years ago but partners APG Property, Gary Dempsey Developments and Rolly Tasker Sails started work on the $80 million first stage, to finish in mid-2015, comprising 51 apartments north of McCabe Street last week.

APG Property division manager Wayne Leverington said Taskers was started because of a demand for downsizing in the western suburbs.

Adjacent North Fremantle will become part of the western suburbs in proposed council mergers that critics consider will potentially benefit developers.

‘We don’t know if mergers will have a huge impact because of (State Government planning strategy) Directions 2031, so all councils will be driven by that over-riding policy,’ Mr Leverington said.

Discussions between the partners and Fremantle and Mosman Park councils required the project’s second stage to have eight townhouses on the north end of the site to blend the development with neighbouring Buckland Hill homes in Mosman Park, before a second stage complex of 40 apartments is built.

The late Rolly Tasker, who won Australia’s first sailing Olympic medal at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 and whose yacht Siska dominated offshore sailing in WA during the 1980s, stopped making sails at the site in the early 1990s.

Opinion, Page 8