Owners of Wollongong’s Regent Theatre building have painted the beloved landmark olive green, after heritage investigations confirmed this was the facade’s original colour.
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The 59-year-old picture palace, now a church, is in the midst of a refurbishment made complicated by its listing on the state’s heritage register.
Gateway City Church enlisted a specialist architect for the job about 18 months ago, when GPT’s new Wollongong Central development was opening across the road.
“With [developers] GPT putting quite a lot of money into the area and making the street look fantastic, we felt really the church should be keeping up with that,” Pastor Scott Hanzy said. “[The paint job] is just the beginning; we want to keep improving the frontage.
“We’re going to look at putting new signage up and getting all the marble cleaned at the front. Bit by bit we want to get it back.”
Under state heritage requirements, even the process of selecting the new paint colour was complex and costly. Paint scratchings were taken from 25 places on the building’s exterior, to determine its original colour.
“It’s very challenging,” Pastor Hanzy said. “We are told to keep these things as heritage, but have very little support. We’re just a group of church people who are having to throw in finance to make it happen.”
The church bought the 1200-seat theatre for $3.5 million in 2005, then spent $1 million on improvements. The building was placed on the market in October 2009, in a surprise sale bid that came to nothing.
Pastor Hanzy said the building had at times seemed ill-suited to the church’s activities.
“We have 80 kids here on Sunday morning and nearly 100 every Friday night – we don’t have any break-out areas for this," he said. “We’ve had moments where we’ve started to go through with selling it, but with GPT across the road and what’s happening on Keira Street, we’ve decided to stay.”
Illawarra theatre owner Herbert Wyndham Jones planned the Regent’s construction during the 1930s and 1940s, but did not live to see it realised. His wife and son ran the picture business before his daughter, Rowena Milgrove, took it on. Mrs Milgrove died in January, 2004, 20 days before she was going to close the cinema permanently, amid mounting financial pressure.
Pastor Hanzy said the ‘Regent’ sign would likely survive the refurbishment, but a new sign signalling the church’s presence was in planning.
“To this day we still have people who think it’s a cinema, especially tourists” he said.
“We had one guy sit through the entire service then ask one of our ushers what time the movie starts.”
