Bonwit Teller Will Return to Beverly Hills in Big Way

The new Australian owners of Bonwit Teller are bringing the upscale specialty clothing store back to Beverly Hills, where a previous regime closed an unprofitable outlet early this year.

The new store, expected to open in fall 1989, will be the anchor of a swanky $115-million development with 20 to 30 stores on the last stretch of Rodeo Drive not now occupied by retail development--the parking lot where an American Savings building once stood at Wilshire Boulevard.

“It has to be one of the great retail locations in America--in the world, for that matter,” Michael J. Babcock, president of the L. J. Hooker Retail Group, said Thursday.

Hooker, the diversified Australian company that bought Bonwit Teller from Allied Stores in April, is also exploring other West Coast sites for Bonwit stores, including several in the Los Angeles area, Babcock said. Orange County and San Francisco are among the other locales where the firm would like to open stores, he said.

“There is no question we will add additional units,” Babcock said. “This presented itself at an opportune time, so we’ve taken advantage of that opportunity and now we’ll build around it.”

On Jan. 3, Allied Stores closed the original Bonwit store in Beverly Hills, diagonally across Wilshire Boulevard from the new site, and explained at the time that the store’s configuration made it unprofitable.

The new store will be at least twice as large as Ralph Lauren, Polo and Gucci, the largest existing retailers on Rodeo Drive, according to Douglas L. Stitzel, whose San Francisco-based company will develop the project in partnership with another Hooker subsidiary and Berisford Capital Corp. of London. The developers purchased the site from American Savings for a reported $50 million.