Attic

Pale light pushes through a gap in the corrugated iron roof and lands across dusty timber floorboards in the attic of the former Sundell Holden workshop, Smith Street, Chatswood East. Tangled white cables pool against the far wall, and a vertical timber beam throws a hard shadow across the exposed brickwork. The upper storey stands stripped back to its structural bones. Sundell Motors Pty Ltd held Holden dealer code 610, assigned to Chatswood, and ran the Smith Street site as its workshop and service centre, distinct from the showroom the company operated on the Pacific Highway. The company was registered with ASIC on 5 January 1967, and four Sundell entities consolidated under the single name Sundell Motors Pty Ltd in September 2018. The site carried no heritage listing and sat on land zoned for light industry, already transitioning toward retail and commercial use by the time Woolworths filed a development application for a five-storey building on the site in 2017. The application drew more than 700 submissions, most opposed on traffic and small-business grounds, before Willoughby City Council approved it in March 2021. The workshop was demolished around 2021, and Woolworths Chatswood East opened on 26 October 2022. This photograph, made in 2015, records the upper storey in the years between the last shift and the demolition crews: stripped back, exposed, waiting.