Quality behind the $250m St. Clare retirement development.

On 1 December 2025, the first residents started moving into St. Clare. They carried boxes through a door that, two years earlier, had been an active construction site in the heart of Kew. For them, it was a home. For the team that built it, it was the close-out of one of the most demanding residential builds in Melbourne: four buildings, restored heritage fabric, a magnesium pool, a cinema and a basement speakeasy, all delivered on a single 1.4-hectare site.

St. Clare is VMCH’s $250 million retirement precinct in Studley Park, Kew, designed by Woods Bagot and built by Hacer Group. It holds 103 premium apartments for over-55s alongside resort-grade amenities and more than 50% open space. A build at this scale, with heritage detailing and finishes residents see and touch every day, lives or dies on quality. This is the story of how a project like St. Clare comes together, and why getting quality right is the difference between a handover and a home.

A precinct, not a project

Most people picture a single building when they think of an apartment development. St. Clare is closer to a small village. The 1.4-hectare site carries four residential buildings holding 103 apartments, with historic buildings on the site restored and repurposed as shared spaces. Woods Bagot took its cue from Kew’s grand mansard-roofed homes and the area’s Arts and Crafts heritage, then arranged the new buildings as a series of pavilions that step with the slope of the land and the existing trees.

The amenities read more like a five-star hotel than a retirement home: a magnesium pool and wellness centre, a cinema, a wood-panelled library, a restaurant, two bars including a basement speakeasy, private dining rooms, a golf simulator and a hair and beauty salon, supported by a concierge and 24-hour staffing. More than half the site was kept as open space, including St. Clare Green, vegetable gardens and a private dog park.

Hacer Group delivered the build under a design and construct contract, with project management by Stonebank and landscape design by Oculus. The numbers behind it are easy to underestimate. At its peak the project supported more than 300 jobs, and by completion over 2,000 people had worked across its various stages. Every one of those trades, packages and sign-offs had to land in the right place, in the right order, to a standard that would survive close inspection from the people about to live there.

Why a build like this is hard to keep clean

Complexity is not just about size. St. Clare combined several things that each make quality harder to control, all at once.

Heritage restoration sits next to new construction, which means working to tight tolerances against existing fabric that has its own quirks and movement. Four buildings ran in parallel, so the same trade could be at a different stage in four different places on the same day. Resort-grade finishes leave nowhere to hide: a misaligned tile, a paint defect or a poorly sealed joint is visible the moment a resident walks in. And because this is owner-occupier housing, the client at handover is not a facilities team that will live with a snag list for six months. It is a person unpacking their life into a home they have paid for, in some cases more than five million dollars for a penthouse.

That changes the economics of a defect. Across the industry, rework is estimated to cost five to ten times more when it’s found after handover rather than during the build. On a precinct selling premium apartments to fund a for-purpose mission, a defect that slips through is not just a cost. It is a crack in the trust the whole project is built on.

This is the part of construction that spreadsheets were never built for. A defect log with 4,000 rows that only one person updates does not tell a site manager what is actually outstanding across four buildings this morning. Paper inspection sheets sitting in a ute don’t roll up into a clean record an owner can audit at handover. The bigger and more intricate the build, the wider the gap between what the paperwork says and what is true on site.

How quality holds a complex build together

On a project like St. Clare, quality management is not a department. It’s the connective tissue that keeps hundreds of people working to the same standard, and it shows up in three places.

The first is the inspection and test plan. ITPs define what gets checked, by whom, and against what standard, before work is covered up or signed off. When they live in one system that every trade can reach from the field, the right people get the right hold points at the right time, instead of an inspection being remembered after the plasterboard goes up.

The second is defect management. Catching a defect is only useful if it’s logged, assigned, tracked and closed with evidence. On a multi-building site, that needs to happen in real time and in one place, so nothing falls through the cracks between packages or buildings.

The third is handover. Every inspection passed and every defect closed should compound into a clean, complete record that proves the work was done right. When that record is the natural output of the build rather than a frantic assembly exercise at the end, handover stops being a deadline to fear.

This is the work Visibuild was built for. It’s a quality and commissioning platform made for complex, multi-subcontractor construction, and designed to be used in the field by the people doing the work, not just managers in the office. That field-first design is the difference between a system that gets adopted and one that gets ignored. Around half of the world’s top-tier builders now run quality on Visibuild, and teams typically move from spreadsheets to site-wide visibility in under two weeks. Hacer Group is among the builders that manage quality this way, which is part of why a project as layered as St. Clare could be brought to a clean finish.

The result: a handover, and a home

St. Clare was completed in November 2025 and opened to its first residents early December, just in time for them to spend their first Christmas in their new homes. The market response told its own story. More than 85% of apartments were reserved by opening, including a record price of $5.1 million for a penthouse, in a precinct that VMCH has described as the largest project in its history.

There is a second result that is easy to miss. VMCH is a for-purpose Catholic organisation, and the capital generated by St. Clare helps fund its mission work, including affordable housing for older people on low incomes. Every apartment delivered to standard is also a contribution to that mission. VMCH publicly credited Hacer Group and, in particular, Vin Sammartino for the leadership that drove the project’s outcomes.

For the builder, the throughline was collaboration held together by a shared standard. As Hacer’s Vin Sammartino put it, “The collaboration between project contributors to get to this point has been outstanding.” On a build with four buildings, restored heritage, more than 2,000 contributors and finishes that had to be perfect, that collaboration only works when everyone can see the same source of truth. We are proud to have been in Hacer’s corner on it.