Over 1.6km of tubing wraps the building and cools wastewater off the stills so it can re-enter distilling. The steam people photograph is the system working.
That the building earns the listing. Our standard measures farming and production, not architecture, and a beautiful distillery should not flatter a verification it played no part in.
Drive up to Four Pillars in Healesville and the first thing you see is the copper. It wraps the building in a veil of fine tubing, catches the light, and on a cold morning has steam rising off it. It reads as pure design gesture. The kind of thing an architect argues for and a client eventually agrees to pay for. It’s a heat exchanger.
The Prettiest Thing
on the Site is plumbing
Still, cladding, line, bar.
More than 1.6 kilometres of copper pipe runs around that building, and what moves through it is wastewater coming off the gin stills. Hot water goes in one end, travels the veil, sheds its heat to the open air, and comes out cool enough to go back into the distilling process. The steam people photograph on winter mornings is the system working.
We keep returning to this detail because it collapses an argument the drinks industry has been having with itself for years. Sustainability is usually discussed as a constraint on design: the thing you give up to do the right thing, the reason your building looks worthy rather than beautiful. Here the sustainability requirement produced the most striking thing on the site. Nobody chose between them.
The most photographed object on the property is a cooling system. That is not a coincidence, and it is not decoration that happens to work.
One material, four jobs
Follow the copper and you get the whole building.
It starts inside, in the German-made stills that are the reason the distillery exists at all. Copper has been the still material of choice for centuries because it strips sulphur compounds out of spirit as it condenses. It’s an old, unglamorous piece of chemistry that no better material has displaced.
So when Breathe Architecture went looking for a cladding, they took the still metal and put it on the outside. Bettina Robinson, who led the interiors, described the reasoning plainly: copper is a living natural material that will wear and patina gracefully over time. It also happens to be entirely recyclable at the end of its life, which is a rarer property in architectural cladding than most people assume.
Then the copper does a third job. Fine pipes run from the production floor straight through to the bar, delivering gin on tap into reusable bottles rather than into single-use glass. Breathe puts the saving at around 29 tonnes of glass a year. It’s also, incidentally, the most theatrical thing in the room. You can watch the spirit arrive from the place it was made, forty metres away.
And the fourth job is Beth’s Bar itself, the copper-clad centrepiece, positioned so it’s visible from every dining area. Port-hole windows look down from the restaurant into the distillery below. The craft stays on show rather than being tidied away behind a service door.
Still metal, cladding, gin line, bar. One material doing four things, and ageing into itself rather than out of fashion.
What the water does next
The most surprising thing about the site isn’t visual at all.
Stillage water, what’s left after the botanicals have given up everything they have, runs through the central courtyard. It’s a dry, tannic liquid, still carrying the juniper and citrus and pepperberry that went into the gin. The effect is that the courtyard smells, faintly and continuously, of spiced chai.
Nobody designed that as an amenity. It’s a by-product of routing process water through the building instead of piping it out of sight. But it means a visitor walking to the bar is smelling the actual production process, which no amount of scent marketing could manufacture and most distilleries have engineered away entirely.
The rest of the environmental record is less poetic and more load-bearing. The building runs entirely without fossil fuels: no gas anywhere in the new development, a fully electric commercial kitchen, and a 100kW rooftop solar array. During construction, all steel, concrete and timber waste was recycled, and none of the excavated material went to landfill. The material palette is recycled brick, solid timber, a coir and timber entry portal, and upholstery made from pineapple waste fibre on locally built furniture.
Robinson’s phrase for the palette is that it’s perfectly imperfect. Materials chosen because a scratch or a knock doesn’t diminish them. Which is its own kind of sustainability argument. A surface that looks worse every year gets replaced. A surface that looks better every year doesn’t.
A material that improves with damage never needs replacing. That is a sustainability strategy disguised as a taste preference.
The part we should be honest about
This cost seven million dollars.
It’s worth stating plainly, because there’s a version of this article that holds Four Pillars up as a rebuke to every distillery that hasn’t done the same, and that version would be unfair. A closed-loop copper heat exchanger is not available to a producer working out of a shed with a second-hand still and a bank covenant. Most distilleries aren’t choosing decoration over function. They’re choosing between a new fermenter and a new roof.
What Four Pillars actually demonstrates is narrower and more useful. When a producer does have capital to spend on a building, and in premium spirits plenty do, the default is to spend it on the appearance of heritage. Brass, leather, dark timber, a wall of old bottles, the visual vocabulary of a distillery from a century ago. That’s the industry norm, and it’s expensive, and it does nothing at all.
The same money here bought a system. That’s a choice about where design effort goes, not a choice about whether to have any.
The gin has to be good, and it is
None of the above would matter if the spirit were an afterthought, and this is where a great many sustainability stories quietly fall apart.
Four Pillars was founded in 2013 by Cameron Mackenzie, Matt Jones and Stuart Gregor on a straightforward proposition: that an Australian gin ought to taste Australian. The botanicals bear that out: Tasmanian pepperberry, lemon myrtle, finger lime and wattleseed sitting alongside the juniper that the category legally requires. These aren’t garnishes on a London Dry recipe. They’re the reason the gin tastes of somewhere.
The sourcing discipline runs deeper than the botanical list. The oranges are grown specifically for the distillery rather than bought on the open market, which turns a sourcing claim into something checkable. Spent citrus from distillation goes to a neighbouring winery rather than to waste. The B Corp certification covers the entire operation, sourcing and energy and supply chain and worker welfare, rather than a single product line.
And the drinking holds up under blind assessment. The Rare Dry Gin has taken 95 points from Decanter and gold at the International Wine and Spirit Competition. The same competition awarded Four Pillars its Global Green Spirit Trophy in 2022. The building won its category at the Sustainability Awards that year and was shortlisted at the Victorian Architecture Awards and the Eat Drink Design Awards. Very few producers in any category are being judged well by architecture juries and spirits judges in the same twelve months.
Judged blind by spirits panels and judged in public by architecture juries. Passing both is rarer than passing either.
The habit worth taking
We list Four Pillars at Gold tier, verified through B Corp certification covering the whole operation alongside documented botanical sourcing. The building isn’t part of that assessment. Our standard measures farming and production, not architecture, and we’d rather say so than let a beautiful distillery flatter a verification it played no part in.
But the building tells you something the certification can’t, which is why we wrote about it.
Next time you’re somewhere that’s spent real money on looking a particular way — a distillery, a cellar door, a restaurant that’s clearly been designed rather than merely fitted out, pick the most striking object in the room and ask what it does. Most of the time the answer is nothing. It’s cladding, and there’s no shame in that; rooms are allowed to be pleasant.
Occasionally the answer is that it’s cooling the water, or carrying the product, or holding up the roof. When a producer’s aesthetics and their operations turn out to be the same decision, it usually means somebody thought hard about both. That’s a reasonable proxy for how they think about everything else, including what happens in the field.
Find the most beautiful thing in the room and ask what it does. Now and then, the answer is plumbing.
Sources & further reading
- ArchitectureAU — Coated in copper: Four Pillars Gin Distillery
- Breathe Architecture — Four Pillars Gin Distillery project record
- Breathe Architecture — Four Pillars Distillery 2.0 now open
- Australian Institute of Architects — Four Pillars Gin Distillery 2.0, Victorian Architecture Awards
- Sustainability Awards 2022 — Commercial Architecture Large, Four Pillars Gin Distillery 2.0
- Eat Drink Design Awards 2022 — Best Bar Design shortlist
- Free Bacchus — Four Pillars Gin, Gold Tier producer profile
Project photography credited to Anson Smart and Kate Longley, via Breathe Architecture.