When it comes to Scots College’s multimillion-dollar new student centre modelled on a Scottish baronial castle, it’s beginning to feel a lot like groundhog day. Six years after the $40,000-a-year Bellevue Hill institution first lodged plans for what is being called “ Ian Lambert’s vanity castle” after the college’s headmaster, students and staff remain in the dark about an opening date. As CBD reported last year , it was meant to be 2021, but then COVID happened, it started raining all the time, and Lambert may or may not have grandiosely insisted on acquiring special sandstone slates from Scotland.
Then it was meant to be 2023, but the year screeched by. When we last turned our attention to the subject in March , right after new amendments to the design were approved by the NSW Department of Planning, the school’s PR people told us only Lambert was authorised to give an on-record comment. Via a bit of disingenuous backgrounding, we were informed that construction would be completed by April.
It’s now July and what do you know, there’s still no official opening date, and no response to CBD’s queries about all this. At least Scots got Prince Edward in last year to lay the foundation stone, which is all very pomp and circumstance. We can report that the John Cunningham Student Centre, as the project is officially termed, is close enough to completion to land a few reviews.
The castle was recently picked up on by the folk over on r/ArchitecturalRevival, a sub.
