David Jones Bondi

Bondi was the second store in the Tier 1 fixture programme and carried the standard set at Chatswood, across the same department spread: beauty, womenswear, menswear, footwear, homewares, eyewear and point of sale. What made it different was how it had to be delivered.

The store could not be closed and could not be handed over department by department in one continuous run, so the refit was structured as a sequence of discrete stages, each with its own fixture package, its own approvals and its own installation window. That structure sets the real requirement: every stage has to leave a store that trades correctly the following morning, and no stage can depend on a later one to look finished.

Fixtures were drawn from the shared David Jones library rather than designed from the beginning, so each stage could be specified quickly and to an already-approved standard. Across the six stages the store took 204 distinct fixture styles and 558 units, and the library is what makes that volume tractable: the work per stage is production and installation rather than design.

Greater Group manufactured to approved shop drawings, inspected before dispatch and tracked fixtures by container into Sydney, timed to the stage they belonged to rather than to the programme as a whole. Each installation window was booked through the centre’s dock and site access procedures, and the sequence was planned so that the departments still trading were never dependent on the one being refitted.

Bondi was refitted across six stages to the David Jones fixture standard, with the store trading throughout and each stage completed within its own access window.

It is the clearest demonstration on the account of what the fixture library is for. A store refitted in six separately approved packages could easily read as six different projects; because every package came from one library and one production chain, it reads as one store. Greater Group now holds a standing maintenance engagement here alongside the other Sydney stores.