Faradays opens in Auckland with Emett's Lottie's inside
A luxury department store has taken over Auckland's heritage-listed Milne & Choyce building on Queen Street, and its ground-floor restaurant is named after the sister who founded the original store.
Faradays Auckland opened to the public at 1pm on September 26, filling the heritage-listed Milne & Choyce building on Queen Street with more than 220 brands across nine categories. The three-level store, co-founded by Eddie and Constance von Dadelszen, brings Maison Margiela and Jacquemus to New Zealand for the first time, alongside established fashion, beauty and wellness names.
Mayor Wayne Brown attended the opening and framed it as replacing something the city had lost. “It fills a bit of a hole that was left just up the road where there used to be that kind of shopping, cafe culture,” he said, adding the store is “aimed at high-spending tourists and high-spending local New Zealanders.”
A restaurant named for the founding sister
It fills a bit of a hole that was left just up the road.
The ground floor holds Lottie's, an all-day restaurant from Josh and Helen Emett's Emett Group, the team behind Onslow and Gilt Brasserie. The name honours Charlotte Milne, one of the sisters who founded the original Milne & Choyce department store on the same site generations ago. The 70-seat kitchen is headed by chef Zach Meads, previously of Onslow.
Lottie's is running private bookings and staff training from September 26 through October 1, opening to the public on Friday, October 2, with reservations opening October 14 — a staggered rollout the operators say is meant to avoid overwhelming the kitchen on day one.
Filling a gap Smith & Caughey's left behind
Faradays arrives 16 months after Smith & Caughey's, Auckland's previous flagship department store, closed after 145 years on Queen Street. That closure left the city without a comparable anchor retailer, a gap Brown pointed to directly in his remarks at the opening.
Auckland's restaurant scene has had other recent reopenings to point to, but a department store betting on both retail and a 70-seat dining room is a different kind of wager — one that depends on Queen Street pulling shoppers back into the city centre, not just diners.
