News

110 Year Anniversary: 10 landmark buildings from yesteryear

October 31, 2024 | Projects

Whether groundbreaking, innovative, celebrated or niche. Paynter Dixon has delivered buildings across the spectrum. Here are 10 landmark projects from yesteryear:

  1. Hotels galore in the 1930s. ‘Paynter & Dixon’ was commissioned by Tooth Brewery to build and renovate hotels, including Exchange Hotel on Bridge Street (now The Republic), Oxford Hotel in Drummoyne, Great Northern Hotel in Newcastle, and Criterion Hotel (Park and Pitt St). Many of these iconic hotels still trade and are listed by NSW State Heritage.
  2. NRMA House on corner of Spring and Gresham Streets, 1933. A new six-storey headquarters for the association which was established 17 year earlier in 1920.
  3. QANTAS new head office and workshop at Kingsford Smith Airport, 1938. The Queensland airline was established in 1920 but moved head office to Sydney in 1938 – coinciding with the first commercial flights from Australia to England (which involved 10 days of flying and nine overnight stops). This was a breakthrough period for Australian aviation.
  4. Rockdale Town Hall, 1940. Celebrated for vibrant Art Deco flourishes, the town hall is listed by NSW State Heritage, and remains a beloved civic centre for the Rockdale community.
  5. Dunlop Sporting Good Factory, Bankstown, 1948. Paynter Dixon pioneered the design and construct system in Australia with this first building. Chairman Ron Paynter (son of founder, George) famously brought back the concept from a tour of the US.
  6. Hurstville Bowl, 1960. Australia’s first fully automatic tenpin bowling centre introduced an American pastime to our shores. Sydney Morning Herald reported “The flatness of the lanes do not vary in any part of its whole 60ft length by more than 140,000th of an inch.”
  7. Australian Window Glass Plant, Dandenong, Melbourne, 1960s.  The first drawn glass plant in the Southern Hemisphere covered a massive area equivalent to almost 14 FIFA football fields – 96,250 m2.                      
  8. Shipping Container Terminal, Fremantle, 1968. Australia’s first container terminal and depot was instrumental to modernising international trade for the nation. Paynter Dixon went on to build container terminals in NSW, Victoria and South Australia.
  9. Cadbury Schweppes complex, Tullamarine, Melbourne. 1975. The then largest soft drink factory in the Southern Hemisphere churned out 360 million cans of soft drink per year.
  10. Sonar Test Facility, Meadowbank, 1985. Opened by Defence Minister Kim Beazley, the facility was designed to keep Australia abreast of the latest anti-submarine warfare technology. Comprising an underwater acoustic test tank, the $750,000 hardware enabled the testing of components of underwater radars.