Consultation Room

The Smith Street building in Chatswood East was the workshop and service arm of Sundell Motors Pty Ltd, the company behind one of Sydney's North Shore Holden dealer networks. While the Pacific Highway site handled new vehicle sales, Smith Street was where the mechanical work happened, the building assigned Holden dealer code 610 under the authorised dealer network. Sundell Motors Chatswood Pty Ltd was registered with ASIC on 5 January 1967. Over the following decades the company operated a multi-branch structure, with confirmed entities at Chatswood and Pittwater. By 2018, four Sundell entities were consolidated under a single company name: Sundell Motors Pty Ltd, effective 3 September 2018. The end, when it came, was not a local decision. On 17 February 2020, General Motors announced the withdrawal of the Holden brand from Australia and New Zealand. Sundell was one of 185 Holden dealers operating across the country at the time of that announcement. The ACCC intervened on 22 May 2020, noting that dealers had been given inadequate time to consider compensation offers. The Holden brand ceased trading in Australia on 31 December 2020. This photograph was made in 2015, years before the franchise withdrawal, when the Smith Street workshop was already vacant. The building stood empty long enough to accumulate layers of street art and graffiti across its walls. Inside, a small room holds a bare table and a scatter of files, coated in dust, left where someone set them down. Natural light falls across the surfaces and picks out what time has settled on them. The room carries no clue about when the last person walked out, or whether they expected to return. Willoughby City Council approved a development application for the site in March 2021. The Woolworths Chatswood East supermarket opened on 26 October 2022. The building is gone.