The Farmers' Trading Company Building: Proposal for Registration

For the Culture and Heritage Planning course I did last year, I investigated the potential of the Farmers' building to be a heritage building registered with the Historic Places Trust.

The Farmers’ Trading Company Building was the main store of Farmers’, situated on Hobson Street in the Auckland city centre. Its large and imposing form has thus far survived in Auckland where many other old buildings have been demolished. Its current use as a hotel has used the R. A. Lippincott architecture for the Art Deco theme of the Heritage Hotel, whereas the other parts of the store's history, its multitude of buildings and their various additions, and features such as the roof-top playground, are less obvious.

The facade

The tea room

(Photographs by Patrick Clearwater.)

Here are some of the reasons I thought it was worth protecting:

On the top floor of the annexe towards the back of the building is the tea room, with stone walls, an elegant vaulted and patterned ceiling, cast iron light fittings and large windows with views of the harbour.

Everyone shopped at the Farmers’ store. People have memories of the store. Tea rooms, department stores and shopping in the city centre were part of the culture in Auckland, and form part of its social history. The store included a large number of exciting modernisations and was involved in many events in the city.

The Farmers’ Trading Company Building is significant in this respect because it remains a source of memories, creates reactions and makes people think about other people, other times and other perspectives.

It is exciting for people to imagine past events occurring: memories and thinking can create emotions in people and make them feel part of something larger.

The visual form of the building—its size, its Art Deco facade that joins the buildings within it together—reveals part of the history of the store: its rapid growth.

The Farmers Trading Company has historical value as being the site of part of Aucklands economic history. The prosperity and decline of Farmers’ matched the pattern of growth in department stores in New Zealand and overseas.

The store tells the story of Robert Laidlaw, who leaves a history of retail innovation shown by the store’s continual updating and modernisation with the latest technology and retailing methods, such as the first large store car park and later multi-storey car park (still existing across the road from the store on Wyndham Street).