For a long time, the department store has felt like a relic of another era, as boutiques thrived and online retail boomed in its place. Then Smith & Caughey’s closed its Queen Street doors last year after more than a century in business, seeming to confirm what everyone had suspected: that the great, sprawling, floor-by-floor experience had no place left in Auckland’s landscape. Until now.
Faradays, the new department store from the team behind the original Faradays boutique in Parnell, is opening at a moment when few would have bet on anything like it returning. For co-founder Constance von Dadelszen, the ambition itself was never in question. “Faradays will open with a considered edit rather than an exhaustive one,” she explains, “a curated house of brands spanning fashion, beauty, and home, rather than an attempt to stock everything under one roof. Walk in, and I want the first feeling to be one of ease: a store that has been composed, floor by floor, department by department, so that nothing feels accidental.”
That composure didn’t happen overnight. “The idea itself is one Edward [von Dadelszen, Faradays co-founder] and I have carried for years, but the building of it, the leases, the brand relationships, the fit-out, has consumed the better part of the last two years in earnest, with the groundwork stretching back further still.”
It’s a significant leap from the boutique model that built Faradays’ reputation. “A boutique, by its nature, asks a customer to already know what they want,” von Dadelszen says. “A department store gets to have a conversation with them instead, to introduce them to a beauty house they’ve never heard of on their way to buying a coat, to let their children roam somewhere delightful while they shop. We had built something people trusted at a smaller scale, and I kept coming back to the same question: if we know how to curate well, why confine that skill to one register? Auckland didn’t have a store that could hold that whole conversation. We decided to build the one it was missing.”
There was no single lightning-bolt moment. “It built the way conviction usually does, through repetition,” she says. “It was in watching customers ask for things we simply had no room to carry, in realising the boutique format had a ceiling and we were standing right underneath it.” What settled it wasn’t ego, but simple logic. “We could keep doing an excellent version of something small, or we could do something genuinely significant for this city.” It’s a big claim in a retail environment that has, in recent years, given New Zealanders plenty of reason to be cautious about big claims, but von Dadelszen is candid about the scepticism she met head-on.
“Anyone attempting something of this scale in this market will find no shortage of people happy to list the reasons it won’t work, the size of the market, the cost of the build, the fact that no one has done a department store here in a generation for a reason. I understood the caution; it wasn’t unfounded,” she continues. What kept her going was clarity, not stubbornness, and this just might be a “once-in-a-generation opportunity.” “If the fifteen-year-old version of me knew she’d be opening a department store by the time she turned 40, I think she’d be proud, and thoroughly excited,” she says.
That ambition is easiest to see across the store’s three levels, each with its own mood and pace. “The ground floor is designed to seduce on arrival, beauty and farmacia, childrenswear, menswear, and contemporary fashion all sit here, because that’s the register most people want the moment they step off Queen Street: quick, sensory, easy to say yes to,” von Dadelszen explains.
Faradays Farmacia, the store’s beauty and wellness offering, was inspired by the local Parisian corner pharmacie. “That feeling of stepping in for something small and walking out having discovered a little luxury, or a discerning local brand you can’t find anywhere else,” she says. “Farmacia isn’t a beauty hall in the old department-store sense, it’s been built as its own destination, one we expect to become a serious part of the business in its own right.”
From there, the mood shifts as customers move between levels. The top floor is designed to linger: here you’ll find a restaurant by acclaimed New Zealand chef Josh Emett, alongside the store’s luxury offering, whereas the basement level has a younger, faster-paced energy, holding travel, activewear, lingerie, sneakers, and a soundbar.
Unlike the previous boutique iteration, which prioritised international luxury brands such as LOEWE, Alaïa, and Givenchy, largely unattainable for the majority of Kiwi shoppers, this time Faradays is placing priority on finding a balance between homegrown talent and global names. Alongside those highly-desired international designers, Faradays will stock beloved Australasian labels including Kowtow, St. Agni, and Viktoria & Woods.
“A store only earns its place if it speaks to where it actually stands,” von Dadelszen says. “They’re included because they’re genuinely excellent, and because our customer already loves them. Part of our role as a department store is to put those labels in direct conversation with the biggest names in the world, and let them hold their own, which they absolutely do.”
That philosophy played out publicly in the store’s first brand announcement. SKIMS, rather than a heritage luxury house, was chosen to introduce Faradays to the market. “It’s a brand with genuine cultural reach, one that speaks to a woman in her twenties and a woman in her fifties with equal ease,” she explains. “Leading with it told the market something important about Faradays before we’d said a word ourselves: that this wasn’t going to be a store that only speaks to the top of the market. Luxury sits at the centre of what we do, but I never wanted Faradays to feel unreachable.”
Then there’s Jacquemus, and if you know anything about the fashion industry, you’ll know exactly why that name changes everything. It’s one of the most in-demand names in fashion right now, and its arrival at Faradays is a milestone for New Zealand retail.
“Brands at that level are understandably selective about who they trust with their name in a new market, and rightly so,” von Dadelszen says. “We didn’t come to them asking for an allocation; we came with a genuine point of view on how the brand would live within Faradays. We attended a number of meetings with their leadership team while we were in Paris, and I did the initial buy in the Paris showroom, with Simon [founder of Jacquemus] there.”
For all the momentum, von Dadelszen doesn’t shy away from admitting how hard the process has actually been. “Harder than I let myself admit, and I say that as someone who doesn’t love admitting things are hard,” she says. “There is a particular strain to running something this large alongside a family, the two don’t divide neatly.”
What’s surprised her most is where inspiration has come from in the middle of it all. “My son came home from school recently with something he’d made, and it ended up shaping our entire external marketing campaign, it’s a strange, wonderful thing when a five-minute moment at the kitchen table outdoes a week of boardroom thinking.”
Even now, in the final stretch before opening, one thing remains untouched. “Sundays are non-negotiable, we block the whole day out for family, and our world simply revolves around them,” she says. “It’s the one boundary I haven’t let this project touch.”
Looking ahead, the ambitions extend well beyond opening week. “Consistency of point of view, above everything,” von Dadelszen explains. “Brands will always cycle in and out, that’s the nature of fashion. What can’t cycle is our standard of curation, service, and experience. We also have a 10-year plan that builds on the Faradays brand itself, but we’re keeping those details close to our chest for now.”
What she will say is what she hopes the store gives back to the city that shaped it. “A reason to believe this city can hold a store of genuine international standing without losing what makes it distinctly ours,” she says. “I want Faradays to be the kind of store people plan a day around, where you can find a piece from a brand you’ve admired from afar, discover a New Zealand label you’ll come to love just as much, and leave feeling the city gave you something a shopping trip abroad used to have to. That’s the gift I hope we’re giving Auckland: a store as ambitious as the city itself.”
Faradays opens to the public on Saturday 26 September.
This article originally appeared in the spring ’26 issue of Fashion Quarterly.
Words: Sophie de Renzy.
Imagery: Supplied.
