By Phil Jarratt
Three years from vision to completion is a long haul, even for a commercial building, and Golden Breed owner Nick Van Der Merwe wears the pain of a Covid build in the stress fracture lines of his face.
But he hasn’t lost his sense of humour. “It’s been quite a mission but nothing this good comes without a bit of pain,” he says of his surf brand’s flagship store, right next to the site of his original Golden Breed Noosa store, which is scheduled to open this week. The build itself, which began last February, was plagued with five months of constant rain, and the ongoing Covid issues of no tradies and no materials.
Three years ago, Nick and award-winning Noosa architect Andrew Bock surveyed the Noosa Drive site together for the first time, and then the surf shop proprietor dragged the architect up the hill to the balcony at Halse Lodge, back in the day when you could get a cold beer there. “This is what I want,” Nick said, gesturing expansively around the heritage building hidden in the trees.
Remarkably, Andrew Bock has delivered on that verbal vision, designing a high-ceilinged (four metres) beach house that combines old and new over the three levels of Nick’s “temple of stoke”. He says: “When you start with a blank sheet and try to work out what would be the best thing to build, not just aesthetically but from a compliance point of view, on a tricky block, if you get to something like this then I think everyone involved should be very proud of it. It’s a great building and it sits well in the landscape. In fact it looks like it’s been there forever.”
It might not quite be the “Halse Lodge with a basketball court inside” that Nick initially demanded, but when I had the cook’s tour a couple of weeks back, I was amazed at how close it comes to Andrew’s original drawings. The vast 160 square metres of ground level shop floor looks out onto greenery front and back and is cooled by breezeways. Louvres at the top of the four metre walls provide natural light. Out the back is a surfboard warehouse and hire stock room, on the next level a spacious and airy accommodation, and at tree-top level a roof-top garden for entertaining.
Says Nick: “What we’ve always wanted on this site is a real statement about our brand, all the elements of the DNA of Golden Breed on the one super-site, and Noosa is perfect for that. The dream has always been for a flagship store here, but also a lot more than that. This will be our statement that Noosa is home for the brand, with all our links to the Noosa point breaks and to longboarding over more than 20 years. We’ll create many other stores, but none quite like this. From a retail perspective, I can’t think of a better place to have a surf shop, as big as you’ll find in the Hastings Street precinct and so close to the beach.”
Back in 1999, Nick, then a young Melbourne surfer and rag trader, picked up the once great legacy surf brand Golden Breed out of the dust bin of history, and almost immediately decided that Noosa was its spiritual home. He reinforced this contention by embracing the longboard culture and becoming a major sponsor of the emerging Noosa Festival of Surfing, and in 2008, as he opened key Golden Breed retail stores along the coastline, the first GB store appeared in Noosa Drive.
Nick knew instinctively that Noosa had to become his brand’s spiritual home. In February 2021 Noosa Council approved a development application for the property right next door to the original Noosa Golden Breed store, and Nick told Noosa Today: “That dream just came one step closer to reality.”
When the doors open next week shoppers will be able to explore more than 80 surfboards on the racks, including revolutionary new shapes from local father and son Stu and Ryan Campbell of Campbell Designed, and traditional longboards from legacy surfboard brand Gordon and Smith, now owned by Golden Breed. As well as acres of surfwear and accessories.
