Wollert sits in the City of Whittlesea, between Epping and Donnybrook, and most of it is new. The Wollert Precinct Structure Plan turned grazing land along Epping Road into a run of estates still being built out: the northern end of Aurora, then Lyndarum North, Eucalypt, Rathdowne, Mason Quarter, Ellery and Fellow, with Olivine just over the boundary in Donnybrook. Cornerstone is a building surveying practice working across Melbourne and all of Victoria, and we are in the Wollert estates every week, so inspections here are easy to schedule and we offer fast turnaround times.
Building in the Wollert estates
Almost every lot in Wollert is sold subject to developer design guidelines and a building envelope plan. On the smaller lots, including those under 300 square metres nominated on the plan of subdivision under the Small Lot Housing Code, the envelope fixes the setbacks, wall heights and boundary walls. Where that envelope is an approved building envelope under the Building Regulations 2018, set by the subdivision planning permit and registered on title through a Memorandum of Common Provisions or a section 173 agreement, a design that sits inside it is taken to comply with the siting regulations it covers, so no council report and consent is needed for those matters. Step outside it and report and consent from the City of Whittlesea comes into play and the timeline grows. We check this at quote stage.
The ground is the other thing that shapes a Wollert build. The suburb sits on the Newer Volcanics basalt plains of Melbourne’s north, and the Hanson basalt quarry and landfill off Bindts Road mark its eastern edge. The typical profile is heavy, dark, reactive clay over basalt, sometimes with floaters of rock near the surface: the clay swells when wet and shrinks through a dry summer. The soil report sets the class, and the slab and footings are designed to it. We check the soil report against the engineer’s slab design before the permit is issued and again at pre-slab, because a footing on uncontrolled fill is the most expensive thing to get wrong here.
What we do in Wollert
New homes for volume and custom builders are the bulk of the work: the full permit package, then every mandatory inspection through to the occupancy permit. Owner-builders on the larger older lots along Epping Road and Bindts Road ask for sheds, garages and workshops. Then, on homes a year or two old, come verandahs, pergolas and decks across the back and retaining walls where the estate’s cut and fill left a level change along a boundary. Many are assumed to be exempt and are not: the envelope still applies, the key threshold for a retaining wall is a metre of height, a wall that is part of other building work or holds up a neighbour’s land needs a permit regardless of height, and a wall carrying a driveway needs to be engineered for that load. How height is measured and where the line falls is in our guide on when a retaining wall needs a permit.
Nearby
From Wollert we cover Epping and Donnybrook either side, Mernda and Doreen to the east, Craigieburn and Mickleham across the Hume Freeway, and Wallan and Beveridge further north. See our northern Melbourne page for the full area.