Harry The Hirer Headquarters

Melbourne, Australia

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Canning Street House

Harry The Hirer Headquarters

Melbourne, Australia

Firm

Riofrio Carroll Architects

Type

Commercial › Office Showroom

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2025

SIZE

25,000 sqft - 100,000 sqft

BUDGET

$10M - 50M

Harry the Hirer is an event's company that runs some of Australia's biggest events, including the Australian Open and Formula 1, where split-second timing and seamless logistics are everything. Their new headquarters needed to be a workplace built for focus, adaptability, and the kind of high-stakes operational pace their teams live by. It needed the energy of an actual event's space.

The building, Melbourne's Cotton Mills, is over a century old and had sat largely neglected. That tension between a weathered industrial past and a fast-moving contemporary company became the project's central idea. Rather than resolving the contrast, the design leans into it.

The company was moving from one floor to four. The challenge was both spatial and cultural. How do you preserve the tight-knit, everyone-knows-what's-happening feeling of a single open floor when you're suddenly spread across four levels? The answer was a void cut through the entire building—a dramatic vertical opening that connects all levels visually, acoustically, and physically. Natural light drops in from above, voices carry between floors, and the stairways and bridges inside feel more like a village square than a corporate circulation route.

Technology is woven throughout. A three-storey glass wall embedded with transparent LED screens can shift the mood of the central space entirely—turning the architecture itself into a kind of programmable backdrop, not unlike the event environments Harry the Hirer stages professionally. Mirrored surfaces, animated bluestone floors, and robotically positioned lighting further blur the line between workplace and experience.

Restoration was handled with care and honesty. Original timber bracing, industrial flooring, and the concrete pads that once anchored factory machinery were uncovered and retained—some marked with epoxy inlays as a quiet record of what the building used to be. Amicus, as builder, was critical to this process, bringing the rigour and care needed to realise the project’s complexity.

The result is a headquarters that works hard, looks sharp, and carries its history without apology.