Sleepless Nights & Last-Minute Redesigns: Inside One Club’s $50m Redevelopment

Following two years of construction, the popular Central Coast venue reopened its doors to the public on March 27, 2024 following the $50 million redevelopment.

But Russell has told the latest ClubLIFE Podcast episode, released earlier today, that it wasn’t without its enormous challenges — including a full redesign after the Club couldn’t obtain approval for a power outage when construction was due to start.

“Once we got the piles in the ground and some of the ground slabs were ready to go, the builders contacted Energy Australia to say could we get a power outage on the power lines, we’re on the corner of Yallambee Avenue and the Central Coast Highway… so that they could put the scaffolding up,” Russell tells the ClubLIFE Podcast.

“The energy company said, ‘no problem with Yallambee Avenue, we can give you that power outage, but we can’t do Central Coast Highway, they’re not our powerlines’.”

The Club was advised that the powerlines were in fact owned by Sydney Trains — who had no desire to approve a power outage.

“They said, ‘number one, we’re in an industrial dispute, no one’s doing any work so we’re not going to process your outage’, and then they said, ‘even if we’re going to process it, we wouldn’t give it to you because we don’t do outages’,” Russell said.

“We all sat back and said, ‘what do we do now?’ We thought we could try and challenge this legally and that would’ve taken at least 18 months to go through that process, so what we ended up doing was we had to cut a metre-and-a-half off the front of the building, which prompted a full redesign on the fly and go back to council to get those plans re-approved.”

In a wide-ranging chat on the ClubLIFE Podcast, Russell also discusses his early career in the club industry, including meeting his now-wife at The Epping Club.

He also talks about how he wasn’t always destined for clubs, and why he naturally gravitates to RSL clubs over other club types.

Click on the link below to hear the full interview with Russell Cooper in the sixteenth episode of the ClubLIFE Podcast, which is also available via ClubLIFE.com.au, Apple, Spotify and wherever else you get your podcasts.

If you have a suggestion on who might make an interesting guest for a future ClubLIFE Podcast episode, get in touch with the team by emailing [email protected].