David Jones Elizabeth Street Redevelopment

When David Jones decided to reposition its Elizabeth Street flagship, the ambition was easy enough to describe and considerably harder to achieve. The store needed to operate across twelve retail floors, but the building it occupied had only eight.

Delivering that meant converting spaces that had never been used for retail, bringing the former Market Street store into the flagship, and reconsidering how more than 35,000 sqm of floor area was arranged and connected.

The redevelopment was valued at $200 million and ran across multiple stages. RCP was engaged from concept design through to completion, providing project management and programming services as the building's internal layout was worked through level by level with the client and the design team.

Working with 90 years of history.

The Elizabeth Street store carries real cultural weight in Sydney, and the redevelopment needed to meet modern regulatory standards while looking after the architectural features people recognise.

New double-height escalators and a substantial services reconfiguration were introduced into a structure that was never built with them in mind. Latent conditions emerged throughout the works, and each one called for careful assessment and design coordination before the programme could move on.

Keeping the Doors Open

Throughout the construction period the store continued to trade, and that single requirement shaped almost every decision about how the works were carried out.

The programme was sequenced in stages so that retail operations could continue, with close attention paid to the timing of service shutdowns, the management of noise, and the routes customers took through the building each day.

This called for steady coordination between the consultant team, Mainbrace Constructions and the David Jones operations group, so that construction activity and the shopping experience remained separated in a store that sits in one of the busiest parts of the Sydney CBD.