Australian Firm to Buy Bonwit Teller

Bonwit Teller, a tony, 100-year-old specialty apparel chain owned by Allied Stores, will be sold for $101 million to an Australian real estate developer that plans to aggressively expand the operation and eventually bring it back to the California market, it was announced Thursday.

Hooker Corp., a diversified company based in Sydney, Australia, that is developing four regional shopping malls in the United States, said it expects its cash purchase to close by July 1. Bonwit Teller, which recently closed stores in Beverly Hills and Palm Desert, has 13 locations in the Midwest and East, including New York, Chicago and Boston.

“Bonwit Teller should be in California, but when we come back to California it’s going to be done correctly and with enough mass to warrant the . . . costs associated with being on the other side of the United States,” said Paul Carter, executive director of Hooker, who was reached by telephone in New York.

William S. Ruben, who will remain as Bonwit’s president and chief executive, said the company plans eventually to put “maybe three or four” stores in Southern California and at least that many in the San Francisco area. He added that Hooker plans to build stores as large as 100,000 square feet, up from the current Bonwit average of 60,000.

Hooker plans to install Bonwit as an anchor store at its malls under development in Cincinnati and Tampa, Fla., among other cities. Over the next five years, the company expects to open 15 new Bonwit locations, Carter said.

The sale of Bonwit brings to seven the number of Allied chains sold off by Campeau Corp., a Toronto real estate company that paid $3.4 billion for Allied late last year, then stunned the investment community by announcing that it would have to sell 16 of the company’s 24 department and specialty store chains to raise money for the transaction.

Hooker has extensive U.S. operations through its Atlanta-based Hooker Holdings. These include Hooker/Barnes Homes, Hooker/Barnes Projects and Merksamer Jewelers, a recently acquired chain that has stores in Sacramento and San Francisco and just expanded into Southern California. Last December, Hooker bought Merrill Lynch Commercial Real Estate.