The Excelsior and Stanbeth Buildings serviced the nearby port from the late 1800s. Now they're being reinvented for another century.
Stanbeth House and Excelsior House are two landmark buildings on Customs Street East and Galway Street in Britomart that are gearing up for an exciting new era.
The former warehouses, which have been combined to form continuous floor plates, began their lives serving Auckland's the port, stocking everything from kauri gum to saddlery, and premises from grill rooms to wine and spirit cellars. Now, like many of Britomart's venerable heritage buildings, they're being reimagined for a new era, offering layers of heritage texture along with the best in contemporary workplace amenities - with all the attractions of Britomart right on the their doorstep.
The buildings were last renovated in the early 2000s, and are currently home to co-working space Generator, as well as the acclaimed restaurants Mr Morris, Cafe Hanoi and Ghost Street. Britomart Group's owner Cooper and Company is planning a significant refurbishment of the buildings' upper floors so that they can offer the best in modern office design - just as the they did with the award-winning Hayman Kronfeld Buildings just down the street.
As you can see from the photograph below, there is plenty of good stuff to work with: generous spaces rich in natural timbers and texture, with views over the Britomart precinct from the northern windows, and west-facing balconies bringing natural light and fresh air. This is Generator's existing lounge, a popular gathering space with its bar, high ceilings, and sunlight.
A quick rundown of the buildings' history: Stanbeth House was built first, in 1885, and was designed by James Blaikie, whose previous claim to fame was that he'd worked as a plasterer in the royal residence in Balmoral, Scotland. Excelsior House followed quite a bit later, being built in 1897 after being designed by Edmund Bell, a former president of the NZ Institute of Architects whose best-known work is the elegant Baptist Tabernacle at the top of Queen Street.
Both buildings reflect the styles of their eras: Stanbeth House draws inspiration from Florentine palazzos viewed through a Victorian lens, while Excelsior House, a decade later, was designed in a more stripped-back Edwardian style. Both are Category II Historic Places, although Excelsior House was cut n half in the 1930s to make way for a widening of Commerce Street through Britomart.
Nowadays, Excelsior House is probably best-known for Maunga (above), the five-storey high mural on its western face by artist Shane Cotton, an artwork that's become something of a tourist magnet, with local and international visitors alike taking snaps of it constantly. The work reflects on the way the city gathers people from all over the country (and the world) in it, with those people remembering those connections to their homes while creating new lives here. You can read more about the Maunga work at this link.
The revamp of the Excelsior and Stanbeth buildings is being led by Cheshire Architects, the team behind the award-winning creation of The Hotel Britomart and the accompanying refurbishment of the Masonic and Buckland buildings, Customs Street neighbours of Stanbeth House. In their many years working with Britomart's heritage buildings, the team at Cheshire Architects have developed an intuitive feel for revealing the layers of history in these venerable structures, while also providing them with every modern amenity to make the office a place every team member wants to be in. Their vision for the Excelsior and Stanbeth buildings – two of their renders are below – is about highlighting these layers of history, while also creating some of the most elegant offices in the city, places to which working from home could never compare.
