Heritage Council:
The former Primaries Wool Store, 119-123 South Terrace, is a multistorey brick and iron building in the Inter-War Stripped Classical style of architecture. The walls are red face brick. The roof is hipped, and clad in iron. There are louvred windows to the top section of the front elevation. There is a shopfront with red brick walls, multipane windows, a rendered parapet and a central segmental pediment. ‘Primaries’ is painted across the parapet in black script. The side elevation has louvres to the top section, and a metal infilled gable with a timber air vent. Only the shell of the warehouse remains, as the inside has been converted to apartments.
The place has aesthetic value for its contribution to the streetscape and the surrounding area. It represents the expansion of Fremantle in the gold boom period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is historically significant as a representation of commercial buildings in the Fremantle area.
The Primaries WA was originally built for Wilcox Mofflin as a wool and hide store c1923-25. In 1983 as the Swan Wool Auctions the local wool brokers sold to Primaries of WA for $327,00 (Fremantle Gazette 5/10/1983). In 1989 the wool store and headquarters of Primaries WA was moved from Fremantle to Spearwood.
In 1993 Council approved the conversion of the wool stores to a commercial and residential development. The architect was [[../people/klopperbrian.html|Brian Klopper]]. Council further approved an additional eighteen grouped dwellings in December 1996. In 1998 the Primaries Wool store project was recognised by the Housing Industry Association of WA for its innovative design building quality and was awarded in three categories.
References and Links
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 10 December, 2023 and hosted at freotopia.org/buildings/primaries.html (it was last updated on 10 December, 2023), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.