A luxury amenity for apartment buildings
The pantry your building forgot to include.
The Common Larder is a smart, self service pantry for residential lobbies: quality snacks, drinks and household essentials, open every hour the shops aren't. Tap a card, the door opens, take what you need.
Always open · Always provisioned
- Milk, at 10pm sorted
- A proper snack sorted
- Dinner, late home sorted
- Laundry pods sorted
- The forgotten cable sorted
Downstairs, in your slippers.
The amenity
Three seconds between you and what you came down for.
A smart machine, dressed like it belongs in a good lobby. No coins, no buttons jammed with someone else's bad luck, no row of crisps hanging by a thread.
Any card or phone
Hold your card or phone to the reader. The door unlocks. Completely cashless, no app to download.
Browse like a fridge
Pick things up, read the label, put them back. Smart AI cameras and sensors know exactly what leaves the shelf.
Close the door, done
You're charged only for what you take. A receipt arrives if you want one. That's the whole transaction.
The range
Stocked like a good pantry, not a servo fridge.
The selection is curated by a hospitality professional with fifteen years of menus behind him, and tuned to each building: what its residents actually want, at the hours nothing else is open.
Fresh essentials
The reason you were heading to the shops
- Milk chilled
- Butter and eggs chilled
- Bread daily
Late supper
For the nights the kitchen loses
- Ready meals worth eating chilled
- Protein and recovery chilled
- Better snacks pantry
The good stuff
Small luxuries, properly chosen
- Proper chocolate pantry
- Specialty drinks chilled
- No sugar energy chilled
Forgot it again
The household rescues
- Laundry pods pantry
- Personal care pantry
- Chargers and cables pantry
Every building's larder is ranged to its people. Tell us what's missing and it appears on the shelf; that's the point of a larder run by a human who answers the phone.
For buildings
An amenity at zero cost, zero admin, zero risk.
The Common Larder is installed and operated entirely at our expense. We supply the machine, the stock, the cleaning, the maintenance and the insurance. The building provides a power point, and in return gains the kind of amenity that residents mention to their friends and agents mention in their listings.
The machine is monitored remotely around the clock. Stock levels, temperatures and sales are watched in real time, so shelves are refilled before they empty and any fault is known before anyone has to report it.
We work comfortably with owners corporations and building managers, and arrive with a one page proposal and a straightforward licence agreement designed to be approved in a single committee sitting.
- I.No cost, everInstallation, stocking, servicing and power contribution are all covered by us.
- II.Fully insuredPublic liability cover held by The Common Larder, certificate of currency supplied with every proposal.
- III.Kept beautifulCleaned and merchandised to hospitality standard. If it wouldn't pass in a fine dining room, it doesn't pass in your lobby.
- IV.Local and accountableOwned and operated in Melbourne's north. Anything that needs attention is sorted the same day, by the person who answers the phone.
Who's behind it
Run by a hospitality lifer, not a logistics company.
The Common Larder is owned and run by Gavin Chan, who spent fifteen years running restaurants, bars and venues around Melbourne, from fine dining rooms to 250 cover weekend services, before bringing those standards to a lobby near you.
He lives in one of the buildings he serves, which is the whole idea: the larder exists because he wanted one downstairs.
Terribly good taste, genuinely hospitable.
Enquire
Bring the larder to your building.
Building managers, owners corporations, developers and residents who'd love one downstairs: it starts with a ten minute walk of your ground floor.
hello@thecommonlarder.com.au