The last buttons will be counted out on Dominion Road at the end of January.

At the large wooden counter towards the back of the store, Derrol Lamb measured two meters of cream poly cotton from a roll of fabric. Once out, he deftly ran big silver scissors along the weave and then folded it up into a bundle. Last Friday morning, Geoff’s Emporium was humming. In front of Lamb, customers lined up with rolls of fabric, tubes of buttons and spools of thread. At the other counter in the middle of the store a woman and her daughter waited to buy some bundles of tinsel for 25 cents each. “I don’t want to tell the customers that the shop is closing,” said the shop assistant, pressing numbers into the till. “We know,” said the woman. She looked down at her daughter. “It’s our favourite shop.” This must have been a familiar phrase. “It’s everyone’s favourite shop,” said the staffer.

Geoff’s Emporium has filled the shopfront and warehouse space at 274 Dominion Road, Mount Eden since 1980. Geoff Lamb, who had had a string of endeavours and shops, leased the old Bell Radio & Television Corporation factory, filled it with an eclectic mix of surplus products, end of lines, fabric, manufacturing errors and anything else he could get his hands on for a bargain, and called the place his emporium, joining his friend Arthur in a fledgling emporium empire. In 1983, Geoff convinced his son Derrol (also known as Ike) to open his own emporium in Browns Bay. Then about 10 years later, Derrol took over Geoff’s Emporium, but Geoff never really retired. He came into the shop every day until his death in 2007. In the shop’s 44 years, its bright yellow and black signage has become an iconic part of Dominion Road’s landscape, and its interior a haven for locals, crafters, sewers, artists and bargain hunters. 

Despite its status in the community, and money still coming in, the time has come for Geoff’s to close. “It’s been more than a business for our family,” says Derrol. He’s asked a staff member to cover for him at the fabric counter and we’ve squirreled through a little door in the side of the shop into his office. The walls are a dark wood veneer covered in carefully painted New Zealand landscapes. There’s a larger canvas with a black and white photo of women sitting in a manufacturing line, taken here on location, when Bell radios were being made in the 1950s or 60s. The room is full to the brim of stacked cardboard boxes, a pile of which tumble when I shuffle my chair a little closer. Behind Derrol’s desk is a shelf full of manilla folders, and inside them are samples of trims and ribbons. 

Derrol is nearly in his GoldCard era and, between Geoff’s and Ike’s Emporiums, working seven days a week. “It’s too much for anybody, let alone somebody of my age,” he says. He’s propped his reading glasses up on his head, atop his silver hair. The decision to close Geoff’s was not made lightly, nor did it come easily. It’s something he’s been thinking about “​​for quite a long time”, and putting off “for a while”. What finally got the closure in motion was an upcoming lease renewal. Typically, they’d be looking at signing another lease for six or more years, but “that just won’t work for us, that’s too long for me, anyway”. The possibility of selling the shop was floated, but the landlord wasn’t too keen on continuing with a different tenant. It was decided that the building would be put up for sale, and Geoff’s would close. 

And so, the building has sold, and Geoff’s has a tentative closing date. “I’ve said, ‘look, the 31st of January’, a day I’ve picked out of the blue. I don’t think we’ll close before then, because we’re gonna need a month to clean up. We’ll call it the 31st. If we drift into February a little bit, that’ll be great.”

Lamb considers it a blessing in disguise to have a leaving date, as otherwise he says he would probably “procrastinate for another few years and keep working”. It’s hard to shut up the shop that seems to be an extension of his father, but Derrol thinks that “he’d be stunned that we’re still going 40 years later”. When you do the numbers, Derrol has in fact run the shop for more years than his father. It’s hard to beat the fact that his dad worked there till his last day though. Geoff went straight from the shop to the hospital, stayed overnight and died the next day. 

Geoff loved his emporium – in a 2013 entry to Auckland City Library’s oral history archive Derrol said, “he worked his last day, which I think would have made him happy.” While Derrol loves the shop too, he’s got more to consider. While Geoff had Derrol to take over and continue running the shop, Derrol’s children have other plans. “It’s just one of those things,” he told me last month. Now he adds that if “something happened to me” he wouldn’t want to leave his wife to cope with the “mess”. “That’s a fact that you’ve got to consider when you start to get a bit older.”

In his actions, Derrol is pragmatic. He says he’s “not an extremely emotional person”. But when talking to me his voice wavers, and his eyes mist. This has been “an especially sad time”. The hardest part so far has been telling the staff. It’s a small team, and some of them have been here for three decades. They’ve watched each other’s children grow up, and “I guess you say they become family”. The day he had to tell them was one of the hardest days of Derrol’s life, up there with the deaths of his parents. “I just didn’t want to get in the car and come to work,” he remembers. Yet despite the fact they will be losing their jobs, they’ve been “sensational” and “supportive”. 

Then the next announcement came – telling the public. Last Monday a big “closing down sale” banner went up in the front window. Another was attached to the chainlink fence by the back entrance. Near the roll-up door, an A4 printout provided more detail. “The old guy who runs the place is becoming a little too long in the tooth and needs to slow down a bit,” it read. “We have had a wonderful time here over the past four decades. So many creative characters and personalities have passed through these doors, such an amazing array and cultural backgrounds and styles. We thank you all.” A similar message was posted on the shop’s social media pages. 

The tributes started coming in. People commented online and walked through the door. For the past week, Geoff’s has been especially busy, and almost everyone has memories to share. They’ve come here since they were little, their grandmother came here or it was the very first shop they came to when they immigrated to New Zealand. At the counter, they tell the staff and Derrol how much they will miss it. In the aisles, total strangers chat to each other about the shop. “It’s meant a lot to people over the years – I did know that,” says Derrol, “but you’re confronted by it, when a situation like this comes.” The mist in his eyes is rising again. “I kind of kept it compartmentalised, it kind of hasn’t really hit me yet, but I think the final couple of weeks are gonna be tough.” Derrol says people can see he’s gotten older, and while they’re sad the shop is closing, generally the sentiment is, “Oh, you are getting on a bit. You do deserve some rest.” 

Though the “old guy running the place” is hoping to slow down and do some fishing, he won’t exactly be retired. He will be at Ike’s Emporium in Browns Bay, the shop he started in 1983 under his dad’s tutelage and that his wife Heather has been running recently. While much of the stock will be the same (whatever is left over from Geoff’s will go there), Derrol will miss the people at Dominion Road. The staff, the suppliers and the customers. He says he will even miss the one-in-100 customers who are difficult. 

When we’re done talking, Derrol jumps straight back behind the counter. A woman is buying 10 meters of black elastic. “It’s so sad you’re closing,” she says. Derrol nods. “It’s just time.”

From a sad and maybe illegal nod to the last of the city’s true suburban malls to a long overdue artisanal upstart, this is the definitive list of malls in Hamilton, the city of the future.

This is the fourth in the Malls of New Zealand series, where we rank the malls in major centres.

The Spinoff is made possible by the generous support of our readers. Become a Spinoff Member today.

Hamilton, as my mother likes to tell me, is the fastest-growing city in New Zealand. A fountain of knowledge who dwells in the city once known as the fountain city, my mum is usually right, but before pitching a ranking of malls in the city of the future, I fact-checked her. According to population estimates and projections data released in February, Hamilton grew 3.4% while Tauranga, another city on the rise, grew 2.5%. Census 2023 data on regional growth actually reveals that the Auckland region is the fastest grower, but Waikato is right up there. As of July, it was also still experiencing economic growth while the rest of the country sunk into recession. As a region isn’t a city, let’s call my mother right enough to necessitate one of the city’s prodigal daughters (me) slinking back to the Tron on a sunny Tuesday to assess its malls.

The criteria outlined by Joseph Harper in his ranking of Christchurch malls is now codified Spinoff and mall-ranking lore. A mall:

• must be a shared indoor space for food and retail, where one might put a Christmas tree.
• must have toilets.
• must have a car park.
• must have a food court (or “multiple food options”).

5. Glenview Shopping Centre, 0.8 of a mall

Straight off the bat, the fourth item on Harper’s bullet-proof list created some uncertainty about whether to include the Glenview Shopping Centre. Your food options are sushi, Golden Bell takeaway and a bakery. While the elders of Glenview (it was 11am on a Tuesday) looked to be enjoying the bakery, can three stand as a definition of “multiple”?

The expressed preference of the people I ran into while doing my mall investigation was that I did not include Glenview. “Oh no,” they said as I wondered how running into people I knew (a pleasure) could still be happening in the country’s fastest-growing city. I drove past my old childhood home and the home of my grandparents to get to the centre I used to visit with them. Given it ticks all boxes, and if we lean into some seasonal generosity on “multiple food options”, nostalgia has prevailed. Sadly, being slightly weepy about my childhood as I pulled into the car park did not help its place in this ranking at all.

It has a large outdoor sun trap of a car park and parking was not difficult to find. Entering, one half of the mall is the New World supermarket, which gives it some local utility and provides a reason for it to keep limping on. The other side is a collection of shops that includes a key cutter, a stationery store, a mysterious shop known only as Shop No. 7, St Vincent de Paul and Habitat for Humanity op shops,  a barber, an Indian supermarket, and an accountant’s office. I may have missed one “centre” of some other description and possibly the advertised physio, but that is basically all the shops. I went into the St Vincent de Paul op shop and can recommend it as a stop for some secondhand holiday books.

Glenview was once the site of one of New Zealand’s first shopping malls, Big ‘A’ Plaza, which opened in 1969. Located at the southern end of a city that has largely expanded northward, the current-day shopping centre is sadly tired and dark. It might more accurately be described as a standalone indoor arcade from an era when needs were simpler, and small suburban malls perfectly fulfilled them.

4. Centre Place

For teens in the 90s and 2000s, Centre Place was where you went to buy CDs, get McD’s and shop the golden triangle of going out clothes. Bootleg pants from Glassons, a two-tone iridescent boob tube from Principals and clogs from Wild Pair were bought to be shared around with friends and worn on wild nights out in the city’s other golden triangle.

Viewed with fresh eyes, Centre Place is surprisingly light and airy. It has very high ceilings and glass inserts in the roof. It has a perfectly adequate food court, Lido and Hoyts cinemas and a multi-level above-ground car park. I got easy parking on the third storey at 1pm on a Tuesday and enjoyed an hour of free parking. A train regularly travels beneath the mall, which can both be felt and heard. The toilets were clean. There were queues, however, which would normally suggest busyness, but in this instance, suggests an insufficient number of toilets. These are the things both novel and mall-basic about Centre Place.

Glassons remains an anchor tenant in the same spot it’s been in since the bootleg pants era of the 90s. There’s also a Jacqui E, a Rodd and Gunn and a collection of sportswear shops. You could definitely whip around and do a Christmas shop here, but it really doesn’t offer a lot more than clothing, gifts, food and entertainment. It’s a main street mall where a lot of the utility tenants, like telcos, banks, supermarkets, Kmarts and Warehouses, are based in standalone retail areas elsewhere on the main street or nearby if they haven’t moved entirely to the north of the city.

Centre Place’s lunch started to get chomped at when The Base, a behemoth retail hub in the city’s north, opened in 2005. Centre Place actually swallowed another mall, Downtown Plaza, and a street between 2010 and 2013, but unfortunately, this extension hasn’t saved it. The mall teens once flocked to now stands as a testament to the way time can freeze when customers depart.

3. Chartwell Shopping Centre

This mall used to be called Chartwell Square and now calls itself “chartwell” in very pedestrian and unassuming lowercase font. It used to have an exterior that I always thought looked edible, like chocolate or caramel bars stuck to its outside. These days, it’s far more ordinary.

It’s akin to Centre Place in its offering but with the advantage of being suburban and therefore housing a supermarket and some banks and telcos. It beats Centre Place on that basis and, because by the time I got there, it was 27 degrees outside, and the mall air-conditioning was very welcome. Car parking was easy, and after running into a friend, I learned that what I thought was new undercover car parking was actually quite old. I nabbed my usual parking spot (circa 20 years ago in a much shittier car) right outside the entrance.

It’s a pretty standard mall. A long-ish concourse with an upstairs and a downstairs. A Santa was waiting for kids to come and get photos with him. There’s a food court on the second level offering everything you’d expect, a Woolworths beneath it and a Farmers.  It’s got brand name clothing retailers like H&M and then a collection of lesser-known gift and clothing retailers. Malls of a certain era increasingly seem to be tenanted in this way and there weren’t any empty shops.

It is clean, quiet, tidy and well-decorated for Christmas. Like so many malls, there is a calendar shop selling at least four firefighter calendars. Never let these taonga of mall life die, even if we all have our diaries unwillingly uploaded to our brains by AI overlords. There’s free parking for four hours. It is a perfectly fine mall for where it is and, as one of the four proper malls in Hamilton, it holds its own enough to kick on for a while yet.

2. Made, Grey Street

It would be easy to slip into some reverse snobbery about Made, a self-described “urban precinct of refurbished buildings that provide an opportunity to house some of Waikato’s most creative makers and doers”, but honestly, I am glad Hamilton has grown to the point of accommodating a spectrum of retail experiences. Those behind the venture might even cringe at the idea of it being classified as a mall, but it meets all criteria.

Made is on Grey Street in Hamilton East. It faces ONTO the mighty Waikato River. Finding a spot that provides an outdoor eating area and a deck overlooking the water feels positively magical in a city that has mysteriously rejected facing, what I believe to be, the right way for years.

The lower level has Volare Bread, an excellent local bakery that makes delicious sausage rolls. There’s a coffee/smoothie/bowl place that successfully makes a iced matcha latte that rivals any you might get in Auckland, both in quality and price, and an Oat Bros, a small food vendor that specialises in, well, oats. The lower level then expands into fresh produce, eggs and a butcher. There are locally made gifts to buy downstairs and on the mezzanine floor and what looks like a gorgeous wine bar. Turn a corner and you hit the Mess Hall or food court. I was personally thrilled to see a vendor selling what looked like classic mall butter chicken alongside more “upmarket” fare like Burger Burger and Crack Chicken. That is where you’ll find the outdoor deck and down a spiral staircase, outdoor tables, coffee roaster Grey Roasting Co, and “the Sheds”.

There is car parking, and in keeping with some revitalisation of the lanes off Grey Street, you walk through to it via a lane and pass a couple of murals.

My dad reliably informed me there is more parking at the site of the old Eastside Tavern (RIP). It’s delightful, and while it’s not a true “mall”, it’s been beautifully done and based on chatter from all those I  know in the city, something people generally feel proud of having. A pleasant number two.

1. Te Awa at The Base

I need to confess that I didn’t realise Te Awa was not The Base and that The Base was not Te Awa. It’s been a while since I stopped and looked around the north of Hamilton, and before this ranking, I had not set foot in Te Awa despite thinking I had after one trip to the Noel Leeming years ago. It turns out Te Awa is the mall at The Base. The Noel Leeming I visited is just at The Base, the small retail kingdom that has taken over a large chunk of land in the city’s northern suburb of Te Rapa.

As referenced in poor old Centre Place’s review, The Base had become synonymous with the death of the central city. For that reason, when you mention it, it elicits a kind of begrudging respect from locals. It’s hard to escape the reality that a bit like Albany in Auckland, The Base is not only home to a very good mall in Te Awa, but every single big box retailer you can think of. You do not “drive into The Base”, you turn into the many new streets that came to be when it first opened.

The Base sits on a 29-hectare block of land that belonged to Waikato-Tainui. It was taken from them before the second world war by the Crown and became the Te Rapa Air Force Base, which then closed in 1992. The land was returned as part of the Waikato-Tainui raupatu settlement.

The Base is a joint venture between Tainui Group Holdings and Kiwi Property Group. As such, and in as much as a mall can do this, it recognises the land on which it is built and tangata whenua. At its entrance is an impressive pou, Te Koohaoo te Ngira (The Eye of the Needle), representing the words of King Pootatau Te Wherowhero. “Kotahi te koowhao o te ngira e kuhuna atu ai te miro maa, te miro pango, te miro whero.”

There is a taonga trail through the mall and the roof, which floods the main concourse of Te Awa with light, uses a niho taniwha pattern.

These are fairly unique features within malls in New Zealand, but overall, I’d say Te Awa is akin to Sylvia Park, the first of the “new” malls to attempt something different and more expansive than your bog-standard mall.

Its food court opens out to an outdoor area, and while it doesn’t offer anything beyond the ordinary, outdoor space at a mall still feels novel. It has a full slate of retail with more than 150 stores. Car parking was easy, and it is also very accessible by bus.

Te Awa is big and unique enough to still be considered a bit different. It ticks all the boxes. Te Awa at The Base is Hamilton’s best mall.

A earlier version of this article hubristically and incorrectly stated that the Big A Plaza in Glenview was New Zealand’s first mall. That honour belongs to Lynn Mall.

This is the fourth in the Malls of New Zealand series, where we rank the malls in major centres. Next week: we head to Dunedin.