Projects

South Bank Horticulture Strategy

  • Calile Hotel Culinary Garden

  • Suncoast Fresh Productive Landscape and Rooftop

  • Brisbane Food City 2050 Vision

Calile Hotel Culinary Garden

The Calile Hotel Culinary Garden is the product of a close collaboration between the head chefs of The Calile Hotel's Lobby Bar (previously Andy Gunn, currently Marky Goodbeer), and Head Gardener Ellia Guy and the team from Future Wild. The garden, located on the rooftop of The Calile Hotel grows produce for the Lobby Bar, with seasonal harvests featured in dishes across the hotel's in-room, events and Lobby Bar kitchen. The rooftop garden is a key component of the hotel's commitment to sustainability and it's rooftop-to-table concept.

The rooftop garden's impact extends beyond a productive capacity, contributing to the hotel's zero-waste policy, providing extra harvests to neighbouring hospitality venues as well as returning kitchen waste to the rooftop's composting facilities, closing the loop on food waste, and returning nutrients to the garden inline with its organic and biodynamic practices. The garden also acts as a vehicle for social engagement and awareness, with the hotel hosting workshops on urban gardening, teaching guests how to grow their own food as well as celebrating the garden's bounty with seasonal cooking demonstrations and special 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.

Client
The Calile Hotel, Lobby Bar

Year
01/01/000 - ongoing

Suncoast Fresh Productive Landscape and Rooftop

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

Future Wild worked with Suncoast Fresh and Green Endeavour 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 rooftop garden has recently received national acclaim, being recognised as a National Finalist of the 2025 Delicious Harvey Norman Produce Awards.

Client:
Suncoast Fresh & Green Endevour

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 2021 Ellia, as a core member of a multidisciplinary a team, were semi-finalists in a global design competition, run by the Rockefeller Foundation. Their entry mapped out a 30 year vision for a abundant, robust, decentralised, and community run food city. Their entry titled Brisbane Food City 2050 was shortlisted to the top 75 from a collection of 1300 international entries.

The Vision for 2050 sees food as the reconnecting force between the land, communities, ecosystems and waterways. Currently, food is holding a latent energy, 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

Competition:
Rockefeller Foundation’s Food System Vision Prize

Year:
2021

Collaborators:
Our Food System The Mini Farm Project Green The Street Bee One Third University of Queensland Sprout & Co. Loop Growers Neighbourhood Farm City Winery Blue Dog Farm Alanna Sapwell-Stone