Toohey Miller wins approval for $86m Paddington apartment project

Toohey Miller’s $86 million apartment project on Oxford Street in Paddington, in Sydney’s Woollahra local government area, has won development approval, apartments.com.au reported on 8 October 2026. The approval covers an eight-storey building of 44 apartments at 142-160 Oxford Street and 6 Shadforth Street, assessed by the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure under the state’s affordable housing State Significant Development pathway rather than by Woollahra council.

Why it matters

Oxford Street in Paddington has a heritage-sensitive, low-rise retail strip character, and new apartment schemes there are rare. Because this project went through the state’s affordable housing SSD pathway rather than the standard council development application process, the assessment and determination sat with the state government rather than the local council. For other developers eyeing sites on this strip, the approval is a signal that the affordable housing SSD pathway is a workable route to scale on a site where a conventional DA might otherwise have faced a lower height or density ceiling under the local planning controls.

The project also demonstrates the economics behind that pathway: committing roughly a quarter of the building’s apartments to affordable housing, managed by a registered community housing provider, bought the proponent access to a faster, state-run assessment track and, implicitly, additional height or floor space the council pathway may not have supported on the same site.

The numbers

The approved building totals 44 apartments: 33 at market rate and 11 affordable, to be managed by EchoRealty NSW and ACT for at least 15 years under the affordable housing condition attached to the SSD approval, according to apartments.com.au. That split puts exactly one in four apartments in the affordable pool. The site itself spans 2,023 square metres across 142-160 Oxford Street and 6 Shadforth Street, Paddington, and the eight-storey design, by Smart Design Studio, replaces an ageing 1960s apartment building containing 27 studios along with several terraces and an older dwelling fronting Shadforth Street. Toohey Miller’s $86 million approval value is the project cost cited in the same report; apartments.com.au did not publish a breakdown of that figure by construction cost, land value or fees, so it is reported here as the single total the outlet gave rather than a sum this masthead independently verified. The report gives no figure for objections received during the assessment, so none is used here.

What’s next

With approval secured, the next milestone for Toohey Miller is a construction start; apartments.com.au’s report does not give a timeline for that, and no figure is on the public record checked for this story. The affordable housing component, once tenanted, commits EchoRealty NSW and ACT to managing those 11 units for a minimum 15-year term, a condition typically tied to the SSD affordable housing pathway rather than a standard council consent. The approval is not the only SSD affordable housing proposal moving through Woollahra: Mathieson Property’s own 70-apartment, eight-storey scheme across three Rose Bay streets is under state assessment after re-exhibition closed in August under the same pathway, suggesting the route is being used more than once in this local government area rather than as a one-off tied to this proponent and this parcel.