Five-storey apartment plan to help heritage-listed building 'come alive again'

A proposal has been lodged to restore the old National Australia Bank building on 606 Dean Street and construct 10 units behind it.

The $5.2 million project is being undertaken by building owner Max Sheppard and developer Travis Barker.

A development plan lodged with Albury Council on Wednesday, January 31, said the project's inclusion of smaller apartments "will allow a lower income market to have access to inner city living" and will "upgrade a heritage item to allow access for all users".

Mr Barker said a hurdle Albury building owners often faced when trying to offer commercial leases was overcoming pitfalls related to installing disabled access.

"It is an old building that has sat there for a number of years, we want to make it come alive again," Mr Barker said.

"We're going to put some disabled access to get into the front, so a new shopfront will go in there, and then to make all that stack up, you put the back on it with the apartments and make it into a building that's going to last for another 100 years.

"It's been technically unused for a long time and we can't get anybody to move into it because of the disabled access hurdle, so we've got to redevelop it to make it to make come back to life again.

"There's been a lot of people trying to rent that property, but they can't because we have to get disabled access in there and that's very hard to do with old heritage buildings."

Mr Barker said he hoped to launch work on the project before the end of this year.

"We would hope we can get something through council in the next three to five months because it meets all the requirements. We anticipate starting to build towards the end of the year."

The proposal for the apartment building abutting Globe Lane includes a common area on the rooftop with plants around the edges.

"The heritage value of the (existing) building has been taken into account when designing the alterations and additions to the building," the development plan states.

"Retaining as much of the existing building and character was the priority of the design.

"The outcome was to ... maintain existing heritage items and construct a tower to the rear ... to maintain the existing street presence and scale of the heritage item along Dean Street.

"The resulting design proposes appropriate building separation from neighbours, allow natural lighting and ventilation, and maximise views."

The National Australia Bank building branch, which was opened in 1937, closed in 1998 and was offered at auction in October of that year. It was passed in at $380,000 and sold on Christmas Eve in the same year to Mr Sheppard for an undisclosed sum.