Paint Shop

The paint shop at the Sundell Holden workshop and service centre sits off Smith Street in Chatswood East, a suburb on Sydney's North Shore. When this photograph was taken in 2015, the room had already been empty for some time. Tools rest on the workbenches as though the last shift simply did not return. Behind them, the walls carry the record of the building's working years in the only way walls can: layer after layer of paint, each one a different colour, peeling apart where time and damp have done their work. Sundell Motors Pty Ltd held Holden dealer code 610, assigned to Chatswood, NSW. The Smith Street site functioned as the network's workshop and service centre, distinct from the showroom operation the company ran on the Pacific Highway. The company was registered with ASIC on 5 January 1967, and by the 1990s Sundell was running a multi-branch Holden dealer network confirmed across at least Chatswood and Pittwater. Four Sundell entities consolidated under the single company name Sundell Motors Pty Ltd on 3 September 2018. The Smith Street workshop had no heritage listing. It sat on land zoned IN2 Light Industrial under the Willoughby Local Environmental Plan 2012, in a precinct already transitioning toward retail and commercial use. No heritage constraint applied when Woolworths filed DA-2017/182 with Willoughby City Council in 2017 for a five-storey development on the site. The application drew over 700 submissions, the majority opposing it on traffic and small-business grounds. Council approved the DA in March 2021. The workshop was demolished around 2021, and Woolworths Chatswood East opened on 26 October 2022. What this photograph records is the gap between those two things: the silence after the work stopped and before the demolition crews arrived. Peeling paint. A workbench with tools still on it. A paint shop that ran its last job and simply waited.