Curtain Fabric Factory Outlet

A curtain-fabric factory outlet on Parramatta Road shows the standard form of the corridor's late-twentieth-century retail buildings: a wide single-storey shopfront with the business name spelled across the parapet in capital letters, a roller-door delivery bay at one end, and a row of vehicle parking spaces marked in faded lines across the front. The fabric outlet has been closed. The roller door is shut. The window display behind the front glass carries the dust and discoloured paper of a long-vacant retail space. The signage along the parapet is partly missing letters. The verge between the building and the road is concrete, broken at the kerb edge.

Parramatta Road runs west from the CBD as Sydney's oldest highway and has supported the city's middle-market retail through most of the twentieth century. Curtain-fabric factory outlets were a Parramatta Road type: large-format direct-to-consumer fabric retail, often warehouse-style, run by Sydney's textile importers and rag-trade families before chain retailers and online sellers ended the model. The corridor today carries a mix of operating businesses, vacant buildings, and redevelopment sites awaiting approval. Brett photographed this building in September 2016 in the long late-afternoon light that turns the corridor's painted shopfronts into something close to portraits.