Perth CBD shopping centre

The Saw family, who owned the site, formed the Perth Arcade Co Ltd in 1936 to develop Plaza Arcade and its accompanying Plaza Theatre, replacing the earlier Armstrong Motor and Cycle Agency and the 1916-built Majestic Theatre that had previously occupied the site. Architects Bennett and H. Vivian Taylor designed the Hay Street facade in the Inter-War Art Deco style, giving the building a distinctive multi-storey “symbolic skyscraper effect” that remains a recognized City of Perth landmark within the Hay Street Mall streetscape.

The arcade carries 40 convenience-based shops at ground level along a central pedestrian walkway connecting Hay Street and Murray Street, with the former Plaza Theatre space sitting above. The cinema closed and was converted to a nightclub in the 1980s, a renovation that removed much of the original Art Deco interior detailing, though evidence of the original tiered theatre seating and Art Deco styling remains visible in places, particularly in the landing area.

A further refurbishment completed in October 2006 added new Italian terrazzo mall tiles, modern ceiling work, updated facade lighting and glass panelling, refreshing the retail frontage while leaving the protected Art Deco facade itself untouched. Singapore-listed Starhill Global REIT, part of Malaysia’s YTL Group, bought the freehold property in January 2013 for A$48 million, and the building carries formal heritage recognition from Western Australia’s State Heritage Office.

Starhill undertook a further significant renovation in 2017-2018, consolidating a number of smaller tenancies to open UNIQLO’s first Perth store, a multi-level flagship occupying a prominent Murray Street frontage that has since anchored the arcade’s modern retail identity alongside the historic Hay Street facade. UNIQLO remains the property’s primary anchor tenant, with a diversified mix of fashion, food and beverage and service tenants filling the remaining ground-floor units.

That layered history, a 1916 cinema replaced by a 1936 Art Deco theatre-and-arcade complex, which itself later lost its cinema function to a 1980s nightclub conversion before an institutional REIT owner eventually consolidated the arcade’s small tenancies into a single global fashion flagship, reflects nearly a century of continuous adaptive reuse on a single small footprint in central Perth, distinct from the large-format, single-era shopping centers common elsewhere in this catalog.