Westfield Newmarket is one of Auckland's newest malls. But is it the city's best? Photo / Alex Burton
Greg Bruce is an award-winning senior multimedia journalist for the Herald, writing features, profiles, reviews and essays across a range of subjects. He was born and raised in Auckland, where he still lives.
OPINION
In the battle for dominance amid the fast-changing shopping landscape, one Auckland mall is a clear winner, but there are some surprising losers.
The shopping mall is capitalism’s greatest achievement; a sign of what can be achieved when property moguls and retail empires push each other to ever greater heights in the quest to extract as much of our money as possible.
That malls have formed the fulcrum of our shopping experience for more than half a century and continue to do so even in the face of the existential threat of Temu is not because they are still the most efficient place to buy things, but because we will always like going to nice places and doing stuff while surrounded by other people.
Nevertheless, the growth of online retail has forced mall operators to think fast and change radically in recent years. Both here and around the world, the best malls have added new features, extensions and experiences that have completely changed the way they look and function. If your favourite mall still works much like it did even a decade ago, it’s not going to work for much longer.
A good mall is a place of beauty and aesthetic refuge; a gated community, secure and separate from the rage and disorder of the outside world; climate controlled, well-lit, featuring comfortable seating, art, playgrounds, recreational activities and the smell of sweet baked goods. A bad mall is a bland, standardised retail factory designed to maximise consumer retail spend per visit. The best malls enlarge your sense of humanity - the worst make you feel sad.
But the field is changing fast, and getting unbiased, unvarnished advice on the best of the city’s malls is almost impossible. Your friends and colleagues are geographically compromised and most self-proclaimed mall commentators have extensive conflicts of interest given their economic connections to retailers and/or mall operators.
That’s why, over the past few weeks, we have visited all of the city’s key malls, cataloguing their pros and cons, noting, photographing and assessing every part of their operations, including their carparks, to put together a comprehensive picture of the best and worst Auckland has to offer. Here they are, in order:
Like all truly great New Zealanders, it knows it’s the best, but doesn’t want to brag about it. Beautifully designed and decorated and flawlessly maintained, the fact it’s so spiritually uplifting is testament to the value of trying really hard to hide how hard you’re trying. It’s deliciously uncomplicated, laid out in a straight line over two well-connected levels - a place in which you can never get lost but which is nevertheless stacked with digital touchscreens that will draw you simple and compelling route maps to H&M and Zara. Everything works in concert to achieve the twin goals of drawing you in and discouraging you from leaving. Its carparks are capacious and attractive, its mini-golf course a thematic triumph and the central mall concourse contains the two best examples of public art in an Auckland mall: Simon Lewis Ward’s giant knucklebones and his 375 glass replica jet plane lollies falling from a replica packet suspended from the ceiling. The former is a great place for kids to play, while the latter makes them whine at you to buy them treats, which you probably will, because Sylvia Park makes you feel like it’s the right thing to do.
Parts of it have not changed since it was built; its food court is uninspired and poorly connected to the rest of the mall, and its vast carpark is windswept and uninteresting. But its clever combination of indoor and outdoor spaces sets it apart from the city’s Westfield-ified mall landscape, and its use of overhead space is magnificent, exemplified by the city’s single best piece of mall theatre, which it calls “Garden Lane”: Giant wooden arches soar above you and are covered by a translucent white canopy, making it feel like you’re in a cathedral in an aviary. Ferns flow from the top of shopfronts, the whole area is heavy with plants and slatty blond wood, and it’s got a terrific non-plastic kids’ play area. In the mall’s main building, the overhead game is equally strong: There are angled geometric wood panels resembling feathers, enormous skylights rising from recessed trapezoidal glass structures feat. gold detailing, and - in one dreamlike space - artist Wendy Hannah’s work Liberty - Herekoretanga, which is an ocean of shimmering multi-coloured crystals pouring from the roof like a psychedelic hailstorm. This is the Louvre of Auckland malls.
Beautiful, opulent and completely unnavigable - you can never be sure where you are, how to get where you want to go, or how to get out. The mall was explicitly designed to melt into the surrounding landscape, to become part of the city, and it has largely achieved that, minus the deprivation and squalor. Its driving force and key differentiator is its food, which it does spectacularly, in both quantity and quality. It has spurned the inoffensive roast and curry franchises of the suburban malls and instead chosen to house an intriguing mix of the independent, weird, edgy, decadent and beautiful: high-end, low-end, mid-range, booze, icecream and fried chicken. The epicentral food court is a sprawling, asymmetrical thing of beauty, offering a sense of disorder and adventure in a mall world of drab standardisation. The higher you ascend, the greater the ratio of food to retail, which is important because you’ll need all the sustenance you can get during your subsequent search for an exit.
An odd, badly designed, visually unappealing building in a suburb that has, without evidence, and for at least three decades, been touted as the new Ponsonby, does not sound like a recipe for a successful mall. That Dressmart is not just successful but regularly teeming with so many people you sometimes need to queue to enter its stores is a thumb in the eye to the chin-stroking corporate czars of Westfield et al, who have spent so many hundreds of millions creating and executing their strategic theories about retail mix, consumer flow, spend optimisation and whatnot. By any objective measure, Dressmart sucks. It appears to have grown, weedlike and with a complete lack of forethought, out of a carpark. Its exposed industrial ceiling and unadorned interior make it feel temporary, like it could at any minute be folded up and carted off to Hamilton. And while other malls focus on having something for everyone, Dressmart maintains its stubborn focus on clothes. It’s a reminder success is not necessarily about following the leader, but in thinking differently from everyone else, while still making sure you have both a Glassons and a Hallensteins.
It’s so beautiful as to be offensive. It looks expensive because it is expensive. Nothing is out of place, nothing has decayed or even shown signs of wear. It’s aesthetically perfect, which is great if you like that kind of thing. The outdoor rooftop dining area and children’s playground is unmatched in the mall recreational-experiential space - a place to sit and admire and stuff your face with quite average food. Inside the mall, you’ll find movies, bowling, arcade games, bars and New Zealand’s first Lego store where you can play with stuff. The rooftop water feature has a glass bottom which can be viewed from the floor below and which filters sunlight on to the concourse, as if it were raining gold, which it would need to be for you to justify buying anything at one of the mall’s many luxury retailers. The glassed-in two level airbridge over Mortimer Pass is a quick thrill and the carpark is an extensive and efficient technological glory - by far the city’s best parking building. Here, more so than at any other mall in this city, you are removed from reminders of the harshness and vicissitudes of regular life. Also, more so than at any other mall in this city, you are constantly reminded of what you can never have.
The country’s oldest shopping mall makes no apologies for its architectural straightforwardness and lack of either subtlety or fancy extras. It’s clean, bright and full of the usual shops, but mostly it’s there to do a job for the people of West Auckland, who presumably don’t want to piss around looking at water features or admiring the view from glass-covered elevated walkways. The design brief for the mall’s $39 million “Brickworks” extension, opened in 2015, appears to have been “don’t get any big ideas”. The extension’s most impressive feature is a strange astroturf-covered manmade hill, which appears to exist for children to run up and down. Lynnmall puts function before form. It doesn’t want or need to be anything other than LynnMall. That is not just the very definition of cool but also a manifesto for better living.
Entering the mall from the parking lot on the top level, the overwhelming feeling is of descending into the bunker of a middlingly wealthy American tech entrepreneur prepping for the apocalypse. A startlingly huge and vaguely dystopian Coca-Cola wall mural above the food court dominates the arrival experience and a large neon sign makes the bold and factually incorrect claim “the mall with it all”. It has less natural light than most malls, but there’s a charming feel about the place, a self-contained cosiness that makes it feel less impersonal than most other malls, as if the invisible hand of the market were awkwardly trying to hug you. Its community feel is helped by its scattering of little billboards with historical factoids like the one reading: “Up to 100 budgerigars used to inhabit a central aviary in the mall when it opened in 1971.” Like the mall itself, that’s both a little bit interesting and a little bit depressing.
The upper floor food court is world-class, flooded with natural light and topped with an awe-inspiring, high-arching wood ceiling. The upper floor as a whole is nice, light, spacious and provides a series of interesting insights into mall users’ needs: One thought-provoking triptych features a Liquorland nestling comfortably between a real estate agency and a Specsavers. The mall’s physical apex is The Warehouse, which feels metaphorically relevant, while the mall’s bottom floor is dark and quiet, evoking a feeling of claustrophobia, sadness and ennui, which even the bright lights of Japan Mart can’t overcome, although the whole floor is heavy with bargain stores, in which you might be able to find a disposable trinket to make you feel better.
Because a mall is a place where young people typically use consumerism to express their hopes and dreams for life, rather than to contemplate their death, it was shocking to discover Westfield Manukau has a New Zealand Defence Force recruiting post. Then again, because you need to earn money to spend money, this might prove to be a masterstroke on the mall’s part, if enough of the recruits make it back without PTSD. The mall is navigationally confusing, with multiple atria and multiple wings, making it an excellent self-screening test for anyone considering joining the Defence Force. While clearly tired in parts (it has one of the saddest seating areas I’ve seen at a New Zealand mall - four pouffes sitting on a bare square of astroturf), it’s in reasonably good shape for its age and isn’t as boring as most of its Westfield brethren. The grand entrance to the mall’s Event Cinemas is reminiscent of a Las Vegas imitation of an Egyptian palace and will make you want to go to the movies, even though most of them will suck.
The wooden palings surrounding the upper levels of the central atrium evoke nostalgia for the suburban home ownership dream, which long ago died for the youth of Auckland. The Les Mills on the top floor, by contrast, evokes the more modest dream of getting ripped, becoming an influencer and surviving on the endless supply of free smoothies and canvas tote bags. Takapuna’s Shore City makes the most of its limited natural gifts, with innovative features such as Bubs Club with Suzy Cato, which takes place on the first Wednesday of every month and includes “Songs, stories and fun learning activities + free coffee for caregiver [sic].” (“Terms and conditions apply.”). It also uses its untenanted spaces as promotional spaces for the stores that remain, which is a nice idea because few things are more attractive than confidence in the face of adversity.
With its lack of zonal variation, annoying slopes, strangely long travelators and enormous numbers of passageways to its back carpark, St Lukes makes very little sense. It is to some extent a victim of its original design, more than 50 years ago, which has limited the possibilities for reimaginings. It has had periods of being the city’s coolest and most important mall, but not for many years, and it’s hard to imagine it being either of those things ever again. It trades mostly on the affection many Aucklanders feel for its role in their wasted youth, but its appeal has faded, its traffic access and parking is terrible, and from the outside it looks stupid. Its central rivals Commercial Bay and Newmarket are prettier, more fun and have better food. St Lukes has a lot of history, but unfortunately not much else.
Like Westcity (West), Manukau (South) and Botany (East), Albany caters to the city’s edge-dwellers, but unlike its far-flung colleagues, each of which offers at least some of the quirks you expect from those living at the margins, it is a place of great staidness and conservatism. It looks nice enough and is not without glitz appeal, particularly around its massive central entrance, with its sense of light and air leading to the wide open food court. Mostly, though, it’s perfectly in keeping with the character-free nature of the surrounding area, with its big box mega-stores, meaningless stadium, functional housing and grey corporate architecture. It is almost completely frictionless: you walk up the mall, you walk down the mall, you leave the mall. What have you learned? Nothing. What have you gained? Nothing but the pleasure of knowing you’re about to be somewhere much more interesting than Westfield Albany.
Officially opened in 2015, it still feels fresh and new, which sounds appealing in theory, but it’s hard to shake the feeling its best days are behind it. The highlight is the food court, the enormous windows of which look out upon what appears to be a forest, which is some achievement given that the area is mostly windswept concrete and parking spaces. The irregularly-spaced slatty wood roof of the mall’s central concourse gives the whole place a casual beachy aesthetic, and the overall feel is best described as inoffensive. I experienced a great lightness, as if I might lift off, sail out into the big West Auckland sky and never return. Soon after leaving, I could no longer remember much about the mall, as if I had never been there, as if it had never existed.
Yes, it’s fading fast, but at least it’s doing so gracefully, even beautifully, with hope, dignity and eccentricity. It has Spanish-influenced architecture for no discernible reason, along with giant glass entrance archways and a huge cylindrical skylight that floods the place with natural light, giving its interior a sense of bright sadness. Many of the stores are vacant or closed, but there’s a warm, meditative feeling that comes from strolling its weird sloping walkways and browsing its odd collection of remaining shops. It’s hard to imagine this place surviving without some serious investment, but it would be a tragedy to lose its sun-drenched atrium, which is one of Auckland malldom’s most underappreciated spaces.
Auckland’s saddest mall is also its most interesting. Almost no one comes here, most of the shops are empty and gutted, and its longest-serving tenant has literally just left the building, but its new anchor tenant is Panda Mart, it has both a Book Barn and a book exchange, one of the many vacant spaces offers free table tennis, and it has more seating per visitor than any other mall in Auckland. A visit here won’t enliven the spirits, but you’re guaranteed to not spend too much money, and you’ll have plenty of space and time to think - primarily about societal decay and the end of civilisation - while working on your topspin backhand drive.
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