Earlier this month, Jo Horgan opened her 111th Mecca store: the long-awaited and much-hyped Bourke Street flagship. The three-level beauty store is not only a shiny new vehicle for Mecca’s range of international beauty and skincare exclusives, but also an apothecary, a perfume gallery, a salon – even a cafe. It’s a spectacle, with a design story years in the making – one that reflects founder Horgan’s deep appreciation for design, art and naturally, beauty.

“We first laid eyes on this space four years ago, but really, Mecca Bourke Street is the culmination of 28 years of listening, learning and dreaming alongside our team and customers,” says Horgan, Mecca’s founder and co-CEO.

The project began with the building itself: the 150-year-old, heritage-listed Cole’s Book Arcade, named for the legendary bookstore that occupied the site from 1883 to 1929. More recently, the art deco building housed David Jones’s menswear department.

Horgan enlisted longtime collaborators, Sydney-based architecture and interior design firm Studio McQualter, to lead design and restoration. Horgan says the brief was simple: “How do we expand what beauty is and where it’s going?” A simple idea perhaps, but not in practice.

“Our approach was to reveal the layers of the building’s architectural history rather than overwriting it,” Studio McQualter said in a statement to Broadsheet. The focus was on “re-establishing its grandeur and echoing the building’s early design”.

Restoration revealed features thought to be long lost, including terrazzo tiles from the building’s GJ Coles era between 1929 to 1986, Aztec-patterned tiles beneath flooring and a geometric plaster ceiling. On the first floor facade, the removal of an awning revealed five monumental arches. “Five arches and five letters for Mecca,” Horgan says. “That moment of symmetry made every detail worth it.”

Inside, materials mix the refined with the raw. Polished marble wraps around concrete columns. Timber contrasts with exposed ceilings. Studio McQualter handpicked and flew in six mature trees – four Banyan trees from Queensland and two Moreton Bay figs from New South Wales – to be installed in the Apothecary and Perfumeria.

The scale of the beauty hall could feel overwhelming, but Bourke Street is designed as a series of smaller journeys, each with their own distinct personality. Wide thresholds lead to intimate zones and curved walls frame products. The layout deliberately resists the grid-like structure of department stores in favour of meandering pathways. A newly added floating mezzanine, built from locally sourced, recycled American white oak, opens the space further.

That sense of flow was important to Horgan. “We have over 80 services in store, but they’re all clearly grouped by category to make the experience feel calm and intuitive.”

“It’s hard to pinpoint what bringing art in does, but I know it does change the feel of a space significantly,” says Charlotte Day, an art curator and gallery director who’s been a curatorial advisor on The Mecca Collection (a trove of 300 works by 70 artists) since 2022.

For Bourke Street, Day selected 20 pieces, all by women artists, from the collection including several new commissions.

In the Perfumeria hangs a dazzling handblown glass chandelier by Bethan Laura Wood made in collaboration with master glassblower Pietro Viero. (Wood was the winner of the 2023 Mecca x NGV Women in Design Commission.) In the Apothecary, Diena Georgetti’s glass mosaic panels form a frieze of female figures who seem to dance around a central column. Ascending the stairs to level one, a sculpture by Patricia Piccinini – a large-scale wig of bright pink, dead-straight hair, hangs low. “It’s unexpected, slightly bizarre and utterly brilliant,” Horgan says.

Works by many of Australia’s most celebrated contemporary artists adorn the store – a yellow, welded steel sculpture by Nabilah Nordin; large-scale prints by Julie Rrap; four paintings of women throughout history by six-time Archibald finalist Sally Ross; and two of Atong Atem’s magnetic self-portraits.

Day worked with Studio McQualter to find the ideal location for each work. “The architects had the idea to put some paintings in front of mirrors, which I wouldn’t have thought of, but really like the effect,” Day says.

For Horgan, an eight-metre-high Rorschach-like mural – stretching from the ground floor to level one – by Dutch studio Freeling Waters is a standout. “It’s one of my favourite details in the store, and one I think many people might admire without fully realising just how special it is.”

Gijs Frieling and Job Wouters, the duo behind Freeling Waters, created their own pigments to paint on individual plywood panels, later assembled like a monumental jigsaw along the emporium’s eastern wall. The Freeling Waters work has inspired the Mecca Bourke Street packaging, which is exclusive to the store.

“Not everyone thinks they can engage with contemporary art but I hope, in this setting, that more people get curious about culture, women artists and the stories in their works,” says Day.

The Bourke Street shopfront is clad in a kind of glazed ceramic tile known as faience, and these tiles were, for Horgan, one of the most punishing but rewarding parts of the project. The original tiles, made in Sunshine, dated to the 1920s “but had been lost or hidden over time, and bringing them back meant painstaking colour-matching, multiple kiln firings, and more than a few heartbreaks – including a broken kiln,” she explains. Unable to find a local terracotta maker who could produce the required stoneware, Mecca tracked down a tile maker in the UK that “rebuilt their kiln just to fire the 43 custom moulds we needed.”

The entire building showcases this deft hand at – and dedication to – merging old and new. Lighting and furniture is a mix of vintage and custom pieces sourced by Studio McQualter from across Europe, Australia and beyond. Alongside Bethan Wood’s avant-garde chandelier, there are large-scale mid-century pendants and wall sconces by Venini. Vintage table lamps, mirrors, credenzas and display cases anchor different zones.

The result is an imposing, staggering space that feels palatial yet welcoming; the sheer number of design flourishes means they will only reveal themselves to customers over time – there’s only so much you can digest in a single visit. “Our measure of success will be when people walk in and say, ‘I could live here’,” Horgan says.

“Because that means we’ve created more than a store – we’ve created a space so immersive, inspiring and innovative, it feels like home.”

With additional reporting and writing by Gitika Garg and Katya Wachtel.