Lune Croissanterie is bringing its cult-status pastries to Pacific Fair Shopping Centre
For more than a decade, Lune Croissanterie has inspired the kind of devotion usually reserved for fashion labels and fine diners. People queue before sunrise for its meticulously laminated pastries, plan interstate itineraries around its bakeries and debate favourite monthly specials with the intensity of sports fans. Now, the cult Melbourne-born brand is officially making its Gold Coast debut, with a brand-new outpost set to open at Pacific Fair Shopping Centre later this year – and it’s set to be unlike anything the brand has done before.
For Lune Croissanterie’s founder Kate Reid, the move to the Gold Coast felt inevitable.
“Over the last 14 or so years, we’ve learned that Lune customers come from all over the country – far and wide,” she says. “We’re regularly asked if we’ll open in new cities around Australia. We obviously have a strategy that we’re working towards, but sometimes the customer can be very loud. And we were surprised that the audience from the Gold Coast was a loud audience.”
As the appetite for Lune in Queensland has intensified in recent years, a Gold Coast expansion began to make more logistical sense. The brand already operates a large production facility in South Brisbane, which supplies both its Manning Street flagship and Burnett Lane store.
“Opening on the Gold Coast seemed pretty achievable for us because we’ve already got the infrastructure in Queensland to support a Gold Coast store,” Kate explains.
Still, the brand’s expansion was never going to happen just anywhere. Pacific Fair had been in conversation with Lune for some time before Kate and co-founder Cam flew up to inspect what was on offer. What they found immediately stood apart.
“It was only ever going to work if we found the right space,” Kate says. “When we saw the site, we knew that was the one to bring Lune to life on the Goldie.”
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The Pacific Fair bakery marks a new frontier for the brand – its first true shopping-centre environment – though Kate is quick to point out this is far from a standard mall tenancy.
“Creating that build-from-the-ground-up site in an open-air location gave us the opportunity to do something really special within a shopping precinct,” she says. “It’s also presented us with the opportunity to try something new. I think that’s always motivating when you own your own business.”
That opportunity to create something bespoke has become central to the Lune identity. While every bakery shares the same DNA (think minimalist presentation and meticulous precision), each location is intentionally designed to reflect its surroundings.
She points to the Sydney CBD bakery as an example. “Melbourne’s stores are very bluestone – concrete, black mirror and darker tones. When we opened in Sydney, we really wanted to reflect the fact that Sydney is more sandstone, warmer tones, so we completely changed the materiality we were using to reflect the fact that we were now in Sydney. But when you walk in, you know that it’s uniquely a Lune store.”
The Pacific Fair store will continue that philosophy, with a distinctly coastal interpretation. “It’s lighter, there’ll be outdoor dining, and the materiality that we use feels different to our other stores,” Kate says.
While details remain tightly under wraps, Kate hints that the new location will feature one particularly dramatic design element – one linked to a personal experience from a recent trip to Italy. “I think it’s going to become the most photographed thing in Pacific Fair,” she says with a laugh.
As for the pastry offering, customers can expect Lune’s celebrated classics – including the traditional croissant, pain au chocolat, almond croissant, lemon-curd cruffin and ham-and-gruyere croissant – alongside rotating monthly specials.
A special pastry will also be created to mark the opening of Lune’s first Gold Coast store at Pacific Fair. Kate describes it as “a nostalgic, fun celebration of warmer weather and childhood” – and, she adds, one of her personal favourite flavour combinations.
Though the Gold Coast store won’t produce raw pastry on site, guests will still be able to witness elements of the baking process in action. Lune’s twice-baked pastries will be assembled and finished in-store, continuing a tradition of transparency that has long been one of the brand’s defining pillars. For Kate, that visibility – almost theatrical in nature – creates a stronger emotional connection with both the product and the people making it
“In this digital age, I think we want to be connecting with something that is human and authentic,” she says. “Because we’re transparent with the process, people can see that it’s being made by people. You can sit up at the bar and watch the chefs for hours – there’s an art and a craft and a science and a precision to it. And it’s actually beautiful to watch.”
That authenticity traces back to Lune’s beginnings. Before founding the bakery, Kate worked as an aeronautical engineer in Formula One – a career she famously left behind in pursuit of creating what she believed could become the perfect croissant.
“Lune wasn’t born out of, ‘Let’s create a business to make money,'” she says. “It came from something very pure. I really wanted to create the best croissant I could.”
More than a decade later, the business has grown to nearly 300 staff across Australia, though Kate says maintaining quality remains an obsession. “As you grow, you need good systems and processes in place. But at the heart of it, it really comes down to the people. We’ve got the best pastry chefs and front-of-house staff in the country – these people really, really care about what they do.”
We’ll keep you posted on Lune’s progress. Stay tuned.
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