Projects

The Calile Hotel Culinary Garden
Suncoast Fresh Edible Gardens
Brisbane Food City 2050 Vision

Calile Hotel Culinary Garden

The Calile Hotel Culinary Garden is the product of a close collaboration between the Executive and Head Chefs of The Calile Hotel (previously Andy Gunn, currently Marky Godbeer), and Future Wild. The garden, located seven stories up, on the rooftop of the hotel, grows a diverse range of herbs, vegetables, specialty greens, garnishes and fruit with harvests featured in dishes across the hotel's Lobby Bar restaurant as well as in-room and events dining. The rooftop garden underlines the hotel's commitment to sustainability and embeds a rooftop-to-table ethos across the hotel’s culinary offerings.

The rooftop garden's impact extends beyond a productive capacity, contributing to the hotel’s waste reduction policy, returning kitchen waste to the rooftop's composting facilities, introducing circularity to the hotel’s operations and returning nutrients to the garden, supporting organic practices within the garden. The garden also acts as a vehicle for social engagement and awareness, with the hotel hosting workshops on urban agriculture, as well as celebrating the garden's bounty with seasonal cooking demonstrations with guest chefs and long-table seasonal rooftop harvest dinners. While the garden is not generally open to the public, it can be accessed for events or toured with hotel staff during a guest's stay.

Photography: Anwyn Howarth, Concrete Playground.

Client
The Calile Hotel, Lobby Bar

Year
January 2021 - ongoing

Suncoast Fresh Edible Gardens

Installed in February 2023, for fruit and vegetable wholesaler Suncoast Fresh these gardens wrap around a commercial warehouse space in Brisbane Markets.

Future Wild worked with Suncoast Fresh for over a year from design through to construction. The gardens consist of an expansive ground floor garden, with over 100 varieties of edible and native plants, as well as a large rooftop garden built with wicking beds for more seasonal produce lines. Future Wild maintains and conducts harvests from the gardens on a twice-weekly basis.

The green spaces are both demonstration and working edible gardens that showcase a range of crops that Suncoast Fresh regularly source, alongside hard-to-find varieties and demonstrate the possibility of doing green space differently. Normally, warehouses are surrounded by a straight-line assortment of standard landscaping plants. Instead, this warehouse garden and rooftop is a cornucopia of food, native habitat, and biodiversity.

Produce from the Suncoast Fresh gardens has recently received national acclaim, recognised as a National Finalist in the delicious. Harvey Norman Produce Awards 2025.

Photography: Anwyn Howarth, Imogen Jade.

Client:
Suncoast Fresh (Green Endeavour)

Year:
February 2023 - ongoing

Brisbane Food City 2050 Vision

Future Wild’s deep technical knowledge is complemented by our strategic and systems-thinking approach to urban and productive systems as demonstrated in the 2050 Food System Vision design competition.

In 2020 a multidisciplinary team comprised of Future Wild, Our Food System, Green the Street and The Mini Farm Project, were semi-finalists in a global design competition, run by the Rockefeller Foundation. The entry mapped out a 30 year vision for an abundant, robust, decentralised, and community run food system for Brisbane. This vision, titled Brisbane Food City 2050, was shortlisted to the top 75 from a collection of 1,300 international entries.

The vision for 2050 sees food as the reconnecting force between the land, communities, ecosystems and waterways in Brisbane. It recognises that food currently holds a latent energy in Brisbane, and with a spark has the remarkable potential to enable transformation of our city across all spheres.

"To replace dystopian narratives with positive futures in global food systems, The Rockefeller Foundation designed the Food System Vision Prize. It invited organisations to assemble teams that would answer the question: what is a feasible, inspirational, and transformational food system for 2050 in your place? More than a competition, the initiative sparked radical collaboration with over 4,000 organizations assembling 1,300 teams that spanned 119 countries. The top 10 winning visionary teams shared in a $2 million prize." - The Rockerfeller Foundation

Illustrations: Brenna Quinlan.

Competition:
Rockefeller Foundation’s Food System Vision Prize

Year:
2020

Project team:
Future Wild
Our Food System
Green the Street
The Mini Farm Project

Collaborators: Bee One Third University of Queensland Sprout & Co. Loop Growers Neighbourhood Farm City Winery Blue Dog Farm Alanna Sapwell-Stone