West's Coffee Palace built as Austral Stores in 1903 for Leopold Conrad: florid design by his son A.S. Conrad
The Hindley Street bulding originally known as Austral Stores, pictured in 1908 by Francis Gabriel in its second life as Grant's Coffee House. Inset: The building, as West's Coffee Palace, was state heritage listed in 1984, after its ornate verandah and balcony were removed in the 1960s.
Main image courtesy State Library of South Australia
What became known as West's Coffee Palace was built in 1903 in Hindley Street, Adelaide city, for Leopold Conrad, who had started trading as a butcher and smallgoods manufacturer in 1869 – during boom years for Hindley Street development.
Conrad's firm became one of the largest of its type in South Australia with the head office in Hindley Street. Conrad, who came to Adelaide from Germany as a young man, represented Young Ward (1894-96) on Adelaide city council. His sons A.S. (Albert Selmar) Conrad and F.H. (Frank Herbert) Conrad trained as architects, and became partners in 1906 in the practice started by A.S, Conrad in 1893.
The Cyclopedia of South Australia in 1909 described the Conrad brothers as “associated and to a great extent identified with the introduction of new methods and the wave of modern development which has manifested itself in the State within recent years”.
In 1902, Leopold Conrad's old shops were pulled down and replace by the next year with a 12 shops and dwellings in the complex designed by A.S. Conrad and called Austral Stores by his father.
In 1908, the city council approved dining rooms for Astral Stores, proposed by Jonathan Grant who had leased the complex. Grant had operated successful dining rooms in Hindley Street opposite the Austral Stores that he renamed Grant's Coffee Palace. Coffee palaces were by this time a tradition in Adelaide. With the founding in 1884 of the South Australian Temperance Alliance, and the Women's Christian Temperance Union in 1886, the temperance movement gained a strong political and moral voice.
Coffee palaces sprang up from this philosophy but, by the time Grant’s Coffee Palace moved into the Austral Stores, the role of coffee palaces had changed to cheap accommodation with more frills than boarding houses. They remained unlicensed, weren’t classed as hotels, and were particularly popular with country visitors.
Grant's Coffee Palace was taken over in 1919 by John West and renamed West's Coffee Palace. West's Coffee Palace was listed in the South Australian Directory as part of the Austral Stores until 1921 when the title “Austral Stores" was dropped and each of the tenants listed under individual addresses. When John West died in 1926, his wife Agnes took over managing the coffee palace, and his family continued to run its accommodation. The building was later subdivided, its shops sold and, in about 1960, the ornate veranda/balcony removed and shopfronts inserted.
The complex originally built by W.B. Bland remained an excellent example of the florid freestyle so typical of the Edwardian period. Its extensive use of stuccoed dressings, brick and Marseilles tiles was tied to the Edwardian period and the eclectic approach to design by architects of this era. The principal facade was dominated by twin three-storey towers with flanking pavilions, the roof form being particularly important with vertical elements, party walls, tiles and ridge work.
With stuccoed dressings, the complex was reminiscent of the Adelaide Fruit and Produce Exchange in Adelaide's east end, built about the same time. The building was a rare and developed form of this design idiom. Its scale and detailing was greatly significant to the Hindley Street townscape and terminated the view at the northern end of Rosina Street.
Although altered and deteriorating, the upper floor of the building remained remarkably original.
