David Jones Chatswood

Chatswood Chase opened the Tier 1 store fixture programme, a separate engagement from the beauty hall delivered in Melbourne, and it was the first David Jones brief to cover a whole store rather than one department. The fixture package ran across two trading levels and the full department spread: beauty, womenswear, menswear, intimates, childrenswear, footwear, homewares, jewellery, styling suites and point of sale.

That changes the nature of the problem. A single department can be resolved as one design. A whole store cannot, because each department carries its own fixture families, its own adjacencies and its own brand standards, and a customer moving between them has to read one store rather than a set of separately specified rooms. The store also traded throughout, so every level had to be refitted in staged works around opening hours.

Greater Group held design, fixture production, procurement and installation together, the structure the Melbourne engagement had established, with the factory and the Asia procurement chain inside the same scope as the drawings. On a fixture package of this breadth that is what keeps a store coherent: the department designed last is produced by the same party that produced the first, to the same detail library and the same finishes.

Fixtures were prototyped before release and manufactured to approved shop drawings, then delivered in staged packages matched to the sequence the store could receive them in. The staging is why a single stage’s fixture schedule runs to hundreds of styles: the store was refitted department by department while the levels around each one stayed open.

Chatswood Chase was refitted across both trading levels, with the fixture package covering every department in the store and the work staged so that trading continued throughout.

It is also the store where the fixture library began, and the point at which it became the working method rather than a by-product: the styles resolved here carry the codes that Bondi and Burwood were later specified from. Greater Group has since held a standing maintenance engagement at Chatswood, refitting womenswear seating and signage as the floors wear, which is the position a documented fixture library makes possible.