Almost four hundred guests attended the official launch by Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman on 27 November 2008. The former Keating’s Bread Factory building in Fortitude Valley has been extensively refurbished to create a suite of open plan, interconnected studio spaces.

A new pavilion building on the eastern edge of the site creates
a civic entry sequence and colonnaded courtyard. The central
courtyard is the symbolic and physical gathering space for the studio.
It will be the venue for memorable events. The rebuilding work on
the garrulous site continues a lineage of brick structures. Evolving
over time, the existing envelope is a montage of additions, each
one owing a material and formal debt to the previous. Respecting
this precedent of integration and evolution, the new pavilion
building is constructed from bricks of a similar scale and colour
to the existing. New bricks have been used to mend the existing
buildings and create internal structures and thresholds, visually
and physically binding old and new.