Noel Leeming’s new Westwood store will open on February 5, after it has moved out of Blenheim’s central business district.
The store’s current site, on the corner of Charles and Queen streets, was leased from the Marlborough District Council. The lease was due to end in October but had been extended to the end of March, a council spokesperson confirmed.
Noel Leeming chief operating officer Jason Bell confirmed the central Blenheim store would be open until February 3, and the new location at Westwood Business Park set to open on February 5.
The new site would feature a bigger range of technology, appliances and display kitchens from the likes of Westinghouse, Haier, Fisher & Paykel and Samsung.
Bell said they were excited to welcome Blenheim to the new store in just a few weeks.
“Everything in the new location is super modern and designed to give our customers more choice and a great experience,” he said.
Blenheim store manager Jonathan Cappie said the fit-out had been going really well and thanked everyone locally who had been part of the move.
Meanwhile, the council spokesperson said they were in discussion with a potential new lease partner for the central Blenheim Noel Leeming site, however, the details of that were “commercial in confidence” at this stage.
The property was shared with other tenants, such as the Marlborough Health Hub and Civic Family Health Care. Noel Leeming had been there since mid-2003.
Property records showed prior to this, the site hosted a Farmers retail store, which opened in the 1980s, and later a Supervalue supermarket.
Noel Leeming had also neighboured the former civic theatre, which in 2007 raised concerns that the business could move out to Westwood Business Park and draw shoppers away from the town centre.
Westwood’s developer, Outer Limits Ltd, first applied for resource consent to build the business park in 2004, but was turned down by an independent commissioner. That decision was appealed to the Environment Court, which granted the consent in 2010.
The consent originally allowed a large-format retail building for Bunnings Warehouse or similar, two retail supply stores with an overall focus on the rural sector, a supermarket, a cafe and an unmanned fuel station.
The Environment Court decision limited further development for the first five years, and the business park could not provide tenancy to any business, tenant or occupant of Blenheim’s central business zone for the first 10 years. Those periods had since lapsed.
Noel Leeming’s new site was part of a southward expansion first consented in 2022, intended to be a two-storey “neighbourhood shopping” complex of “smaller retail spaces” with professional offices above.
Large-format retail was mentioned in the plans but not part of the consent application.
However, the consent was altered in December 2023. The new plan was for single-storey large-format buildings, and a different layout was proposed, with retail spaces and a cafe.
Noel Leeming would join several other retailers at Westwood. Bunnings moved there in 2012 and Pak‘nSave in 2013. Kmart opened in 2019, Chemist Warehouse in 2021 and Harvey Norman moved out of the CBD to its standalone build at Westwood last year.
The ribbons on the new Noel Leeming store were to be cut at 9am on February 5.
LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.
