Part Two

131 Queen Street

by Riley Bogard-Allan*

131 Queen Street

Located adjacent to our previously discussed 151 Queen Street, 131 tells a story of boom, bust and boom again. After a glorious half a century as an iconic retail location on the Golden Mile, 131 Queen Street seemed to fall ill through the late seventies and eighties before gaining prominence again as a building reflective of the times. 

131 Queen Street occupies a prominent place in Auckland’s Central Business District (CBD). But its story begins long before its transformation into a modern commercial hub. The site’s early years were defined by smaller, utilitarian buildings that catered to a growing Auckland. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the location became home to the retail store Milne and Choyce.

Mary Jane Milne and Henry Charles Choyce, who took over wife Charlotte’s (Mary Jane’s sister) interest in M & C Milne for the business to become Milne & Choyce, moved their drapery and millinery store from a leased site on the corner of Wellesley and Queen Streets to a prime location ‘between the banks’ in 131-141 Queen Street in 1908. They purchased the Mercantile Chambers for the sum of 50,000 pounds on 27th May of that year. Milne & Choyce’s official historian K.A. Tucker reported that by the end of 1908, plans were already being made for ‘the alteration of the premises to begin as soon as possession was obtained.’

1913: The original Milne and Choyce at 131 Queen Street.

A letterhead of the company Milne and Choyce Ltd. ‘Between the Banks’.

The first iteration of our building of focus at 131 Queen Street was completed sometime in 1921-3. A personal connection between the chair of Milne & Choyce, Charles Rhodes, and head of construction magnates Fletcher Bros, James Fletcher, was central to the latter winning the ‘attractive contract’ to build the new nine-storey store. (The size of the contract is conflicted between sources: Tucker gives 85,741 pounds, exclusive of lifts, fittings and building design fees, while Fletcher later said the contract gave them 100,000 pounds for the main building and 30,000 pounds for the fittings and the tearoom.)

131 Queen Street, upon completion in 1921-3.

Designed by their new structural engineer Eric Rhodes and architect Llewellyn Piper, the building employed a modern flat-slab construction with mushroom-headed columns, recently developed in the United States to be earthquake resistant. This allowed unobstructed ceilings and floor spaces, ‘lending to the monolithic strength of the work an attractive appearance of lightness’. The eighth floor was topped with a mansard roof containing the Tudor Tearooms, the ‘most up-to-date tearooms in Auckland’, seating 600 and opening into an open-air roof garden, with a distinctive pergola. This roof garden was glassed in by 1927. The Auckland Star called it ‘a magnificent building’ that would ‘rank with the finest establishments of the kind anywhere in the world’.

“The ‘Tudor Room’ Restaurant as it was in the inter-war years.”

Important to our going concern of heritage preservation for reasons soon made clear, we must also mention that early 1928 saw plans to erect additional retail and warehouse space. Business was good, and the directors purchased property at the rear of 131 in March 1929 for 18,000 pounds. By 1931, the Annex was a new seven story building adjoining the Queen Street premises but facing Mills Lane. Fletchers were originally to be paid 25,000 pounds plus a fixed 1,200 pounds for plans and specification, but the onset of the Great Depression complicated the project, causing costs to blow out by 4,700 pounds. The Annex’s star attraction was almost certainly the Skyroom on the seventh floor. Writing in 1984, Stephen Cashmore believed it an interior ‘which, to my knowledge, surpassed any Art Deco space built in Auckland before or since’. The Skyroom was an extension to the tea rooms in the main building, intended to be used for special occasions like fashion shows and staff balls.

Looking south down the Skyroom towards the stairway enclosure

In 1955, the promotion ‘Italy at Milne and Choyce’ included fashion paraded by four Italisn models.

On 28 February 1975, Milne and Choyce left 131 Queen Street. While in the 1960s the central city “was still a mecca and ‘going into Queen Street’ was widely regarded as an exhilarating experience”, and ‘even in 1971 there were six major department stores operating and mostly thronged with shoppers’, there was evidence of Queen Street shopping declining in popularity by the mid-to-late seventies.

The retail sector was being overrun by our earliest yuppies. Graeme Bush’s coverage of the period 1978 to 1986 in Advance In Order is highly illuminating here. Office floorspace grew by 32% during this period (and by 75% between 1975 and 1993). In 1986, Mayor Dame Catherine Tizard told ratepayers that ‘no sooner do workers top off one high-rise building than they shift sites and begin work on another’.

But for all this, it looks as though Milne & Choyce ‘upgraded’ when they left 131 Queen Street, or at least they portrayed as much. A strong advertising campaign and international exhibition precipitated the opening of their ‘all new retail store, a shopper’s paradise offering 150,000 square feet of exiting big store shopping’, in the Downtown Shopping Centre. Heritage reports describe how, from the 1960s, Milne & Choyce, like many department stores, ‘struggled to adjust to changing retail climates’. Fletchers acquired control of company, moved the store downtown and sold 131. 

Auckland Star, February 27, 1975: Milnes Special Announcement.

The grey area in my research into the life of 131 Queen Street lies from Milne & Choyce’s departure in 1975 to about 1984. The relevant Heritage listing states that since 1975 ‘the building has had numerous internal alterations for many retail and commercial clients.’ In 1984, we learn the fate of the building’s star socio-cultural and architectural attraction. Cashmore’s previously mentioned June 1984 article was titled ‘Auckland Loses an Art Deco Interior’. He reported that although ‘the former glories of the room were easily appreciable’, the Skyroom had long been blocked up and abandoned. We learn the annex was demolished to make way for a neighbouring tower block. The adjoining Tudor Tea Rooms at 131, ‘considered by some to have been the most lavish interior in Auckland’, were also destroyed.

Cashmore lamented that ‘[t]he Skyroom was lost because it was forgotten’. Despite being said to have hosted a quarter of a million people in one year, by the time the mid-eighties rolled around attitudes had clearly changed and the room was gone without a fuss. Cashmore highlights the irony of the ‘fervent battle’ to preserve the Bank of New Zealand building’s façade just thirty metres away. Those efforts included recognition of the BNZ building’s heritage status, something the Skyroom and Tudor Tearoom certainly could have qualified for. K Road Heritage points out that ‘the utilisation of roof top spaces for facilities to attract customers had been a well-developed feature of European Department stores for several decades, a trend copied by several Auckland department stores…’ In 1981, 131 Queen Street was listed with Heritage New Zealand and is today protected under the Auckland Unitary Plan. But Cashmore argues the Skyroom interior was not adequately protected and ultimately its most captivating feature was lost.

Even in an office boom, there appears to have some been inevitability of 131 Queen as a retail location. Renamed Centrecourt by 1986, its tenants in that year included the Warehouse, Beauty Boots (a cosmetics and perfume seller), Warnocks (menswear), Hannahs Shoes, Stirling Sports, United Video and a coffee lounge. Here we observe the shift of 131 to a ‘multi-store’ building, not dissimilar to the mall style of retail that saw the end of Milne & Choyce at that location a decade earlier. 

Centrecourt, 131-141 Queen Street, 1986.

However, there appeared to be light at the end of the tunnel for this grand old building. But the recency of the major renovations in the 1990s to upgrade the entrance foyer and common areas limits how intimate we as historians can get with these upgrades, save for exterior streetview images. Still, it is encouraging that 131 Queen Street ultimately received some love at the back end of the urban transformation of the CBD that took place during the Rogernomics era.

A unique fact about 131 Queen Street is that in the late 1990s it became linked to one of Auckland’s most infamous unsolved crimes: the murder of Kayo Matsuzawa. The twenty-nine-year-old Japanese tourist disappeared shortly after arriving in Auckland in September 1998. Her body was discovered naked in a utility cupboard off a stairwell in the Centrecourt Building. Persons of interest included the fire alarm tester who discovered Kayo’s body, an associate of the Centrecourt language school and a British killer based at Devonport Naval Base at the time. Coverage available to us today does not shed light on if and how 131’s reputation was harmed as a result of the incident. Kayo’s murder remains a cold case.

Key central Auckland locations relating to Kayo Matsuzawa’s murder (NZ Police).

The twenty-first century has seen 131 Queen Street continue to evolve to meet the needs of a changing city. The building had gone from housing a single retail store in Milne & Choyce to a litter of small outfits in the mid-eighties. In 2009, its tenants included the Whitcoulls Group head office, computer software company Fronde (the building had taken on the name Fronde House), recruitment firm Finetic and the call centre operator Telnet. The changes in tenancy demonstrate a clear shift over time from customer-facing retail to service industries. Extending this further to emphasise just how reflective these buildings are of the societal shifts taking place, 131 Queen Street’s tenants in 2024 were The National Business Review (now a wholly online platform guarded by a subscription wall), property developer Krukzieners, technology consultancies Accenture and Cyber CX, and boutique investment firms Montarne and Five V Capital. 

Heritage preserved, finally: Andrew Krukziener’s renovations of 131 concluded last year.

A final word on heritage preservation to conclude the story of 131. Krukziener Properties were responsible for a substantial redevelopment of 131 Queen Street that concluded in 2024. By all accounts, they did a fantastic job. Full of praise, Lifestyle platform Denizen says, ‘[Andrew] Krukziener looked to the iconic Art Deco architecture of New York for inspiration to craft a design narrative that pays homage to the site’s history while bringing it into the present.’ No doubt paying tribute to 131’s history (Krukziener is well aware of it, having given a presentation on the buildings one-hundred-year life last year) Level One, ‘a food and beverage destination’ even manages to find room for a luxury tearoom.

In the next article, we explore the life of 205 Queen Street, a site which has transformed over time from justice centre to retail location to twin tower skyscrapers by the 1980s, consistently reflecting – and a product of – the social and cultural shifts taking place in each instance.