FORMER HOOPERS STORE

In March 1908 JH Hooper & Company, who had commenced business as drapers at Footscray in 1885, opened a new store and workshop in Sydney Road Brunswick in order to capture the Melbourne trade. The two storey American Romanesque style structure designed by HW & FB Tompkins, architects, and built by Robert McDonald, featured a structural steel internal framework, an arcaded red brick upper floor, a large wrap-around cantilever verandah and a frameless floor to ceiling glass shopfront. Hooper's occupied the building until 1935. A single storey extension was made to the rear of the building in 1937, and in recent times the building was subdivided and altered internally. These alterations also included removal of the original internal timber staircase and installation of a new shopfront.

How is it significant?

The former Hooper's store is of architectural and historical significance to the state of Victoria.

Why is it significant?

Hooper's store is an important early work of HW & FB Tompkins, architects. The Tompkins brothers were the first local designers to specialise in the American Romanesque style, which appeared in the 1890s and which emerged as the dominant commercial style of architecture until about the First World War. They became the leading architectural practice in warehouse and department store work and pioneered the use of multi storey structural steel frame works for these buildings. They designed many such buildings in Melbourne, including the department stores of Sydney Myer.

Hooper's store is reputedly the first example of the "American style of steel construction" in Victoria, perhaps Australia - a concept conceived in Chicago in the late 1880s, and one which was pioneered and exploited locally by the Tompkins brothers during the first quarter of the twentieth century. It is also notable for its early use of a cantilevered or suspended street awning. Spacious cantilevered verandahs became the fashion by the 1920s, thus superseding the earlier more squat post supported types. Hooper?s store is also important as an early example in Victoria of American Romanesque style architecture - a style of simplicity and weighty robustness developed during the last half of the nineteenth century which reflected commercial and industrial wealth and power.

Hooper's store is historically important for its close associations with the Hooper family and John Robertson (John and Edward Hooper's partner), well known Melbourne metropolitan drapers who helped to initiate the universal Saturday half-holiday, and wage boards for shop assistants and employees in the clothing trade. John Robertson was instrumental in the anti-sweating league.

Group

Retail and Wholesale

Category

Shop