Today we’re looking at a familiar building in a different place; we’re in the Melbourne, Australia suburb of Ferntree Gully. It looks quite a bit like a typical American suburb, overall:
But we’re looking at this building in particular:
Another angle:
It’s a swimming pool store now and has been for many years. But that building is unmistakable, isn’t it? I don’t think I have to tell you what it used to be, but do you want some pizza for your pool party?
It turns out the trajectory of Pizza Hut in Australia is almost the same as in the United States. And the same hobby of hunting down former Pizza Hut locations and their new occupants is popular in Australia too. From an article headlined “Inside the strange afterlives of Australia’s Pizza Hut restaurants”:
Remember when it seemed as though every suburb had a Pizza Hut? Throughout the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the chain’s dine-in restaurants and their distinctive red roofs were a ubiquitous sight across the country.
Australia’s first Pizza Hut opened in the Sydney suburb of Belfield in 1970. Arriving just as dining out was becoming increasingly popular in Australia, the American chain quickly established itself as a national institution and favoured cheap-and-cheerful venue for families.
Its dine-in presence, however, has dwindled dramatically over the past three decades. While Pizza Hut still operates almost 300 locations around Australia, only eight offer dine-in service, and precious few occupy the iconic original premises distinguished by trapezoidal windows, brick walls and barn-style roofs.
On this interesting former Pizza Hut on stilts, there’s this bit:
In 2015, photojournalists Ho Hai Tran and Chloe Cahill travelled 30,000km across Australia, New Zealand and North America, tracking down former restaurants to discover what had become of them.
Their journey became Pizza Hunt, a published photography book featuring hundreds of former Pizza Hut outlets from the golden age of dine-in fast food, each reimagined for an entirely different use.
“My favourite is in Victoria,” Cahill told Good Food. “It’s a pool shop in Ferntree Gully and they’ve actually put it on stilts, shifted the whole building to turn it around and created a carpark underneath. Even then it still looks like a Pizza Hut.”
To create parking! In other words it’s a lot like a Los Angeles dingbat. I find this interesting because it’s the same idea as building up instead of out, like with apartment buildings, except not to build more homes but to fit cars without having to eat extra land. Quite efficient, really.
However, it’s actually the case that the original Pizza Hut was built on stilts, not raised later. Take a look at this image. I’m not sure where it’s from, but on this Reddit thread about the building it’s said to be from 1979, and the placement of the sign matches the building today:
In that thread, someone from the family who owns it and turned it into the pool store commented:
My family owns that old Pizza Hut now! Our company is called Seaspray Pools and we build concrete swimming pools. My father in law purchased the building about 20 years ago and did a full renovation himself. He turned the back car park into a swimming pool display, the original ramp is still there too.
And here he shares a video of that display in the back. You can make it out on Google Maps’s 3D satellite view!
That is pretty cool. Chains don’t always use the same exact brand-centric buildings in different countries, and don’t always experience the same fortunes. But the Pizza Hut history and afterlife is much the same here, and I love it.
Related Reading:
Wild that suburban Australia so closely resembles suburban America- right down to the former Huts!
A Dingbat Pizza Hut!