Contact Terence Seah, 董事, 新加坡
terence.seah@benoy.com
Just last month, the redeveloped David Jones Elizabeth Street flagship store in Sydney, Australia, fully opened all twelve floors the public. Featured this week in Mingtiandi, Terence Seah, Head of Benoy’s Singapore Studio and project lead, considers the history and significance of this iconic building, and explains how Benoy has brought “the grand old dame of luxury retail” into the twenty-first century.
Return to Future Thinking“Rejuvenating the interior and exterior, we blended the existing building fabric with a redesigned layout. We also drew on the building’s rich design history, with its gradations of grandeur and beauty.”
With close to a century of history and heritage, the David Jones Department Store in Elizabeth Street in Sydney was at the forefront of Australia’s immersive and experiential luxury retail environment, a leader amongst peers and ahead of its time. It’s success in becoming a city icon and destination disproved the doubters, delighted customers and drew in crowds, both local and from abroad. It reaffirmed David Jones’s reputation for quality and splendour, but further became one of Australia’s leading and most iconic retail spaces.
Fast forward many decades to the current era of ‘retail-tainment’, the desire for immersive experiences, and the evolving requirements and behaviors of today’s end-users, Benoy was tasked with rejuvenating the iconic, heritage-listed building and firmly position the brand as a contemporary epicentre of luxury retail.
Follow the link for the full article featured in Mingtiandi:
“In particular, we considered how its original shading and dimensions were used to reflect certain moods and celebrate special occasions. In this way, we looked back in order to go forward, thinking in terms of ‘conceptual layering’ rather than ‘floors’ to create different experiential zones.”
