Debenhams With Attached Verandah

This is a department store with an attached verandah, dating from approximately 1888-1900, and subsequently enlarged and altered. The building is constructed of red brick in stretcher bond, with sandstone and some red terracotta dressings, a slate roof, and red tile roofs to oriels. It is of eclectic style, with a large rectangular plan.

The exterior is three storeys high, plus attic bays at each end, featuring a 2:4:2 window arrangement. The symmetrical facade includes broad, gabled ends, brick pilasters, stone bands, a coped parapet, and gables with finials. The ground floor has a shop front of 12 unequal bays featuring plain openings in the fifth and eighth bays which lead to a parallel internal passage. The remaining bays have uninterrupted plate glass windows set within extremely slender Art Nouveau shafts. The first floor showcases wooden mullion-and-transom oriels; those in the central four-bay section are canted with pentice roofs to the inner pair and hipped roofs to the outer, while those at the gabled ends are linked by small balustrades on brackets and have pentice roofs that rise to canted second-floor oriels. The remainder of the second floor has narrow, one-light windows arranged in groups of 4:3:3:4 in the centre, and single windows flanking the oriels. The gables contain pairs of attic windows set under 2-centred arches with carved tympani.

The attached verandah, comprising 10 bays, features cast-iron columns with acanthus enrichment to the pedestals, plain shafts with volute capitals, shallow openwork brackets with a fringe, a panelled decorated frieze, a moulded gutter cornice with cresting, and branched finials over the columns (some of which are missing). The cresting is raised and elaborated in the first, fifth, sixth, and tenth bays. The verandah has a curved glass roof.

The interior has not been inspected. The building forms a group with the verandah attached to numbers 525-533 to the left and the verandah attached to numbers 565-571 adjoining to the right; the verandah is part of the series that characterizes this street.