Project Snapshot
| Building | Harbourside Apartments, McMahons Point |
| Built | 1975 |
| Lots | 82 residential apartments |
| Position | Direct waterfront, Sydney Harbour |
| Scope | Facade clean, concrete spalling repairs, anti-corrosion treatment, full external repaint |
| Access | Rope access (abseiling) — full building |
| Paint system | Dulux — coastal high-salinity specification |
| Notable challenge | Rooftop telecommunications tower shutdowns — coordinated weeks in advance with carriers |
| Client | Owners Corporation |
The Building
Harbourside Apartments sits directly on the edge of Sydney Harbour at McMahons Point — one of the most spectacular and most demanding positions a building can occupy in Sydney. Right next to the McMahons Point Ferry Wharf, the building looks across Lavender Bay toward Luna Park, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the Opera House. It’s an address that defines Sydney living.
It’s also a building that takes an extraordinary amount of punishment from its environment. Positioned metres from the water, the facade is in constant contact with harbour salt air driven by prevailing harbour breezes year-round. For a building constructed in 1975 — now approaching 50 years old — the cumulative effect of decades of salt exposure, UV radiation, and Sydney’s summer humidity had taken a significant toll on the exterior.
When the Owners Corporation engaged Next Level Painting, the facade told the story clearly: widespread concrete spalling across multiple levels, corroded reinforcement steel beginning to push through in numerous locations, and a paint system well past the point of offering meaningful protection.
The Challenge: Restoring a Harbour-Edge Building With Active Telecommunications Infrastructure
Projects like this are rarely straightforward, and Harbourside was no exception. Two elements made this job genuinely complex.
The harbour environment. A building sitting on the water doesn’t experience the same degradation curve as one in the suburbs. Salt is relentless — it works into micro-cracks, corrodes embedded steel, and destroys paint adhesion at a rate that inland buildings simply don’t see. The spalling we found wasn’t isolated to a few corners; it was widespread across the facade, particularly on the lower and mid-levels most exposed to harbour spray and wind-driven salt. Every repair had to be done properly — there was no patching over the problem.
The rooftop telecommunications towers. The building carries extensive mobile telecommunications infrastructure on the roof, which created a significant pre-works planning challenge. Our Sydney Rope access crew were rigging from the roof, which requires technicians and equipment to work in close proximity to active antenna arrays. Telecommunications carriers have strict protocols around this — and for good reason, as active antennas pose genuine safety risks to workers at close range.
Coordinating shutdowns with the relevant telecommunications companies is not a simple process. Carriers will not simply turn towers off on request; it requires formal applications, approvals through their safety and operations teams, and scheduling within windows that minimise network impact — which often means early morning or late-night slots, with strict time limits. We began this process weeks before works were due to start on site, working through the necessary channels to secure approved shutdown windows that allowed our riggers to safely set and retrieve ropes from the roof without exposure to active antenna radiation.
This kind of pre-works planning is invisible to the client, but it’s the difference between a project that runs safely and on schedule, and one that stalls before it starts.
How We Approached It
Stage 1: High Rise Building Washing
Before any repairs could be assessed properly, the entire facade needed to be cleaned. Years of salt deposits, biological growth, and general surface contamination were masking the true extent of the underlying issues. We pressure cleaned the full exterior using an appropriate technique for the existing coating — thorough enough to remove all contamination, without compromising any sections of paint that remained sound.
This is a critical step that’s often underestimated. You cannot accurately scope concrete repairs, identify hairline cracks, or confirm adhesion quality without seeing the substrate clearly. The clean gave us — and the Owners Corporation — a genuine picture of what we were dealing with across every elevation.
Stage 2: Concrete Spalling Repairs
The spalling was widespread. Decades of chloride ingress from the harbour environment had penetrated the concrete, reaching the reinforcement steel and triggering the corrosion cycle that causes concrete to crack, delaminate, and eventually break away.
Our process for each repair location:
- All delaminated and compromised concrete was broken back to sound substrate. There is no shortcut here — applying repair mortar over weak concrete only delays and worsens the problem.
- Exposed reinforcement steel was cleaned back to bright metal and treated with a high-performance anti-corrosion primer to arrest the corrosion cycle and create a sound bond for the repair.
- Voids were reinstated using high-strength repair mortar, built up in appropriate lifts and shaped to integrate with the surrounding structure.
- All repairs were finished to match the profile of the original concrete — flush, sound, and ready for coating.
Rope access allowed our technicians to work precisely at each repair location across the full height of the building without the cost or disruption of scaffolding. Every repair zone was directly accessible.
Stage 3: Facade Remediation & Repairs
With spalling repairs complete, all remaining cracks and surface defects across the facade were sealed. Window surrounds, control joints, and any areas of surface irregularity were addressed before any coating was applied.
The entire facade was then primed to ensure optimal adhesion across the varied substrate conditions — repaired concrete, existing sound coating, and any areas of bare substrate.
Stage 4: Full External High-Rise Repaint
The coating system was specified carefully for the building’s location. Sitting directly on Sydney Harbour, standard exterior coatings are simply not appropriate — the salt load, humidity, and UV exposure at this address demand products formulated for those conditions.
We selected a Dulux system specifically chosen for high-salinity coastal environments: UV-resistant, moisture-resistant, and formulated to maintain adhesion and film integrity under the sustained stress of a harbour waterfront position. Product selection at a building like this isn’t a catalogue exercise — it’s a specification decision that directly determines how long the next paint cycle will last.
Each coat was applied by rope access across all elevations — vertical facades, balcony faces, soffits, and architectural details — with consistent film thickness and finish throughout. Working off rope in this environment requires experienced painters who understand how to manage consistent application at height, in variable harbour breezes, without compromising coverage or finish quality.
The Outcome
Harbourside Apartments emerged from the project with a fully restored facade — structurally sound, properly protected, and presenting as the landmark harbour address it is.
The concrete defects that had been developing for years were rectified at the substrate level, not masked over. The new Dulux coating system provides the level of protection appropriate to the building’s position and sets up the Owners Corporation with a paint cycle they can plan around with confidence.
For a building of this age, on this site, the project was also a demonstration of what deferred maintenance costs. The extent of the spalling and reinforcement corrosion we found didn’t develop overnight — it’s the result of years of chloride ingress that goes unaddressed. Proper maintenance — including regular facade washing to remove salt deposits — extends the life of the coating system and slows the rate of future deterioration significantly.
The telecommunications tower coordination, the harbour-specific product specification, the full process from clean to repair to coat — this is the kind of project where doing it properly matters. A building in this position, with these residents, on this harbour, deserves nothing less.
