David Jones Bourke Street Beauty Hall

David Jones’ Bourke Street Mall store is the retailer’s Melbourne flagship and one of the most significant department store addresses in Australia. The brief, which was Greater Group’s first engagement for the retailer, covered the refurbishment of its entire beauty department: every concession, every brand fixture standard and every adjacency on a single floor.

Two conditions set the terms of delivery. The floor was required to keep trading, so the work had to be staged around customers and completed in access windows rather than in one possession of the space. And the department carries hundreds of fixture styles rather than one design repeated, because each beauty house specifies its own, so the refurbishment had to hold every one of those standards while still presenting the hall as a single environment.

Greater Group held design development, fixture production, procurement and installation within a single scope. At this volume the governing constraint is manufacturing throughput and sequencing rather than design resolution, and holding the whole chain is what allows the two to be planned against each other instead of negotiated between separate parties.

Fixtures were value-engineered across the range rather than piece by piece, which is where the commercial value sits on a programme of this size, since a change to a style repeated across a department carries further than a saving on a single hero piece. Production was scheduled against the installation staging, so fixtures arrived in the order the floor could receive them rather than all at once, and the engagement extended into 2024 with additional visual merchandising plinths delivered as the department settled into trade.

The beauty department was delivered across the full floor, with brand-specific fixture styles produced to a consistent standard and installed around trading, and the work continued into 2024 as further visual merchandising elements were added.

Bourke Street was Greater Group’s first engagement for David Jones and a programme in its own right, and it established how the relationship works: one party holding design development, production, procurement and installation, with installation staged around a floor that never closed. The Tier 1 store fixture programme that followed in Sydney was separate work, commissioned later and structured the same way.