Mollison Park at West Village

Need for green spaces

For most of the 1900s the Mollison Park site functioned as a gated forecourt to the iconic Peters Ice Cream Factory in Brisbane. There was limited access for the local community and visitors to the area.

Over the years the Brisbane suburb of West End has grown and become more popular, creating a need and an opportunity to revitalise the area around the factory.

West Village was the answer – a mixed-use precinct developed by renowned Japanese construction firm Sekisui House.

Sekisui House engaged RPS’ landscape architecture team to play a lead role in the Village’s design – with a focus on green spaces. The team has worked on a number of projects in the West Village including The Common, and Mollison Park - a subtropical landscape outside the old Ice Cream Factory.

Reimagining the way shopping centres look

To create Mollison Park, RPS landscape architects worked with the developer, state and local governments and community associations to provide the public with 2,200sqm of new public accessible parkland.  Shopping centre precincts are traditionally hot, hard spaces, but the design team wanted something different. The approach was to create a sub-tropical place that reflects the natural creek systems that once ran through West End.

The team researched the area and designed a garden that acknowledged the site’s history, was functional and sustainable, and contributed to the biodiversity of the precinct.

The design encourages visitors and residents to interact with the landscape and learn about relationships between local fauna and flora species such as the Pararistolochia praevenosa – an Australian vine, which is the natural food source for the vulnerable Richmond Birdwing Butterfly. Also, bee boxes house thousands of native stingless bees, which help pollinate the local plants.

There are 17 mature trees, wildflowers, mounded lawns, and a sensory garden linking Mollison Park to The Common with nooks and trails for everyone to explore.

The park is supported by several sustainable systems including:

• Solar power for the lighting.
• Grey water from two adjacent residential buildings is treated onsite and used to irrigate the precinct’s gardens along with a rainwater tank.
• Recycled and sustainable materials have been used including two thousand bricks from the original factory to build pathways and garden walls.