75 Old Burleigh Road: Rendering a 23 Storey Tower in Surfers Paradise, Gold Coast
Fletcher Living is one of New Zealand's biggest home builders and one of our longest running clients. When they brought us The Poplars, a large apartment complex going up in Christchurch Central, the site was a live construction zone. Buildings A through G were at various stages of the build, buyers needed something to look at, and the sales campaign could not wait for scaffolding to come down. They needed the full picture: streetscape and building renders, interiors, 3D floor plans, and a way to show exactly how the finished development would sit in the city. It is a familiar position for developers right now. Off-the-plan campaigns live or die on whether a buyer can picture the finished product, and in a market where presales drive funding and momentum, nobody can afford a listing that is just a fence line and a crane. The Poplars is a good example of what the answer looks like when it is done properly and at scale.
The Brief
Lightwave wanted campaign ready exterior visuals for their developer that could carry an off-the-plan launch for a 23-storey apartment building. Two images did the heavy lifting. First, a hero streetscape render that shows the tower in full, front on, so the design speaks for itself. Second, an aerial site perspective where we took the 3D model and overlaid it onto a real photo of the surrounding area, so anyone looking can see how the tower actually sits amongst the existing Surfers Paradise skyline. Alongside those, we produced closer exterior views of the arrival and the podium so the campaign had range, from the wide context shot down to the front door. The renders had to be listing quality and buyer-facing from day one. Not rough concepts for the design team, but polished imagery good enough to headline a sales campaign, a website and a brochure.
What We Produced
The hero streetscape is the anchor. The full height of the tower, centred, with its neighbours either side and the street and palms in the foreground. The design itself is soft and coastal rather than hard and glassy. Curved balcony edges wrap each level, the palette is warm cream and stone with timber accents, and sub-tropical planting spills off the podium and the terraces. It reads like somewhere you would actually want to live, which is the whole point when you are selling apartments. The aerial site perspective does a different job. By dropping the model into a real photo of the area, it answers the question every buyer of a high-rise asks, which is "where does this sit and what will I be looking at". You can see the tower in the run of buildings along the coast, with the Surfers Paradise skyline behind it. For an investor weighing up an off-the-plan apartment, that context is worth more than any adjective. Then the closer views bring it back down to human scale. The arrival shot puts you at the porte cochere, car in the drop off, planting overhead, so the building has a front door and a sense of welcome rather than just a facade. The podium approach shows the landscaped street edge with the CBD towers behind. Together, the set moves a viewer from "big tower on the skyline" to "this is what it feels like to pull up out front", which is exactly the shift a good campaign needs to create.
Why This Matters for Developers:
Here is the thing about a big off-the-plan project. Your renders often need to be finished and working for you months, sometimes years, before the building is. The imagery is not a nice-to-have at the end. It is the thing that funds the start. On a 23-storey tower, the lead time on a proper set of renders is tiny next to the build programme, yet it is the piece that lets you open sales, brief agents, build a website and start taking deposits while the site is still a hole in the ground.
That is why the quality bar matters so much on large developments. A single weak hero image on a small residential build is a shame. On a tower where you are asking the market for real commitment before there is anything to stand in, it can cost you momentum you never get back. Getting a considered, listing-quality set done early is one of the cheapest ways to protect the whole campaign. Big projects are exactly the work our team is built for.
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