Architecture is not what it used to be, most of it being prefabricated and then pulled down in the wink of an eye to be exchanged for another bland monstrosity made of poor materials in order to suit a developer’s bank account. This is where the national heritage comes in, to stop the last vestiges of beauty and historical value from being turned into yet another car park.
In New South Wales an old cinema in Grafton, the Saraton Theatre, would have suffered the same fate had it not been considered for national heritage status. It took much more, though, to save this grand old building and to bring it back to her original glory and surprisingly this was achieved by the Notaras family who originally built it.
Neos Kosmos spoke to one of the family members and director of Notaras Bros, Angelo Notaras, about the long winding road of this old cinema’s 84-year history. “Our parents came to Australia from Kithira in Greece in 1908 and our grandfather in 1905 and they settled in Grafton in New South Wales, and in 1926 they built this magnificent cinema and it’s stayed in the family ever since,” said Notaras.
The original cinema, as Notaras explained, had 1,200 seats with an internal balcony and is of the classic cinema design that would have been built anywhere from 1920 to 1955. In 1999 a heritage award was placed on the building and this just in the nick of time story tells of the former Pime Minister’s wife Hazel Hawke, then a National Heritage officer, who was visiting Grafton realised the cinema was about to be turned into a car park.
“She said ‘not over my dead body’, and by lunchtime a heritage order had been slapped on it, because she saw it was advertised to be turned into a car park,” Notaras said.
Now, you would think the rest of this story would be plain sailing – but no. The Heritage listing did prevent it from being destroyed, but sadly now made the building extremely difficult to sell. “We even tried to sell it to the council for a $1, with four front shops included in the deal, but they would have nothing to do with it, and so we were stuck with it.”
Well, clearly this old girl of a building wasn’t planning to leave the bosom of the Notaras family that easily. So a few of its members took the initiative to turn an impossible situation into a workable solution.
“My brother and I decided to buy it from the family and restore it,” Notaras said. “Over the next few years, four family members, Spiro, Mitchell, John and I, negotiated with the rest of the family, and there’s a lot them, and we eventually bought it off them,” said Notaras.
What, for only a dollar? “No, no we paid market price for it,” laughed Notaras.
Once the purchase had been made, $4 million was poured into refurbishing the old cinema, as well as building two state-of-the-art cinemas next door, “which is part of the original block of land and they have been integrated together, as if it’s the one building,” said Notaras.
The old cinema’s refurbishment includes new seating, carpet, lighting, electrics, painting, digitalisation, a roll up screen, automation and even an extension of the stage. But in order to realise its original grandeur, colour consultants were brought it.
“They had to scrape back 60 years of paint to find the original colours, which were stunning and so we duplicated all those colours,” said Notaras. Altogether this face lift took nearly five years to realise. “First of all to go through the heritage people and then two-and-half years with the actual building part.”
And it would seem they achieved this huge task all by themselves.
“I did it all myself and Spiro and the cousins supervised the whole project, including the architecture – everything,” said Notaras proudly. And when asked if they had any background in refurbishment, Notaras answered just as proudly with that one telling phrase, “Well…through the school of hard knocks really.”
The building is now accommodating live theatre and a production is about to open that has, according to Notaras, already sold 1000 tickets. The irony, is there’s now a car park at the back.
“Look, it’s a great resource to have something like this in the middle of the city. Everyone who comes in says ‘wow’, and they didn’t have to spend $20 million to make something similar, but not as beautiful,” added Notaras.