As you drive out from the Bathurst Street carpark, the fine building you see opposite was originally the Crisp and Gunn hardware store and joinery shop. This building was a replacement for the original building that was devastated by fire on the night of 13 May 1922.
The new building was designed by G Stanley Crisp and built by William Cooper and Sons of Molle Street, Hobart.
The Mercury describes the pleasing appearance of the building. It suggests that ‘there is something beyond comfort in what is surely an ideal place to work, with its cheery electric radiators in the winter months and the full supply of sunshine in the summer’.
The woodwork and stairway were made from Tasmanian blackwood. The brickwork was built from bricks manufactured by Crisp and Gunn.
In the Mercury of 30 June 1923, page 7, it was declared the new offices, timber mill and joinery factory are numbered among the best equipped of their kind in Australia.
Forestry Tasmania took over the building in recent years. In 2000, Professor Morris-Nunn and Blythe Yeung and Associates were commissioned to design an appropriate building to connect the old with the new. This is visible east of the Crisp and Gunn building.
William Cooper would have been very pleased with the new appearance and the use of salvaged timber from the original building.
Building on firm foundations 