High Street Preston: The Quality Behind the Finished Build

At High Street Preston, the completed 18-storey build-to-rent development represents years of design, coordination, construction and quality assurance. Delivered by Kapitol for Barings and Aware Super, the project has brought 292 new homes to Melbourne’s north, alongside retail and resident amenities.

Now complete, we returned to High Street with the Barings team to look at how quality was managed through design, fabrication and construction, and why that detail matters long after handover.

Building High Street Preston

During Early Contractor Involvement and design development, our team worked through opportunities to improve efficiency while maintaining the architectural intent. This included alternative materials and finishes, an alternative roof structure and a brick snap façade that removed the need for scaffolding.

Three basement levels required excavation to a depth of 15 metres within a constrained urban site. Our team engineered a top-down slab solution that created an internal loading area above the excavation, allowing loading to remain within the project footprint as work progressed below.

The project also incorporated Cross-Laminated Timber, or CLT, across seven townhouses. The panels were sourced from NeXTimber in Mount Gambier and manufactured using locally grown and processed plantation timber.

Each solution addressed a different construction challenge, but the principle was the same: solve more earlier, reduce unnecessary work on site and find a better way to build.

Quality that lasts beyond handover

During the site walk, Tom Jones, Senior Project Manager at Kapitol, spoke with Lewis Capraro from Barings about the processes behind the build.

Throughout delivery, the project team created visibility around how quality was being managed, with Barings closely involved along the way. From CLT fabrication through to workshopping, inspection and test plans (ITPs), installation and peer review, quality assurance became a shared process rather than simply a final check.

Lewis described Barings’ involvement from CLT fabrication through to delivery. With the material stored before installation, including through winter conditions, moisture was a consideration, with the timber inspected before being sent to site.

That attention continued through construction, particularly in areas where issues may only become apparent after a building is complete. Bathrooms were workshopped with the project team, designers, consultants and peer reviewers, with early installations witnessed before random testing continued across every floor.

For the prefabricated façade, the quality process extended beyond factory inspection to how components were protected and managed through transport before reaching site. Façade testing then focused on risks including condensation, leaks and water ingress.

For Barings, the measure of quality extended beyond practical completion to how the building would perform in the years that followed. The value is confidence beyond handover: knowing the building has been tested, challenged and reviewed throughout delivery with its long-term performance in mind. That’s the difference between completing the work and building quality into it.

From construction to completion

High Street Preston reached completion in early 2026. The finished development includes apartments and townhouses, retail spaces and resident amenities, and achieved a 7-star NatHERS rating.

Behind the finished building sits years of design development, engineering, coordination, testing and construction. From CLT fabrication through to bathroom inspections and façade testing, the project shows how quality is built through a series of decisions and checks across the life of a project.

For us, that’s where improvement happens: finding smarter ways to plan, coordinate and build, then carrying those lessons into the next project.

Watch Tom Jones and Lewis Capraro walk through the finished project and unpack what that approach to quality assurance looked like in practice.