Although J A Booth & Co was a Sydney furniture and furnishing retailer for over 50 years, the company started life in a very different manner: as tea merchants. The business was established around 1890 in Liverpool Street Sydney but by 1904 had relocated to the corner of George Street West and Jones Street, Broadway. It was only around 1919 when H Manuel sold his furniture shop on the opposite corner of Jones Street, that J A Booth & Co acquired the premises and entered the furniture trade.

Around 1931, J A Booth & Co made a major move from the edge of central Sydney to the corner of Goulburn and Pitts Streets in the Brickfield Hill area, right in the middle of a burgeoning strip of home furnishing retail stores. The new location was known as the McIlrath corner, named after this firm of grocers, with the new building constructed in 1928 to an H E Budden & Mackellar design. The six-storey brick structure provided J A Booth & Co with larger, more modern showrooms and the building was featured on the front cover of its 1933 'Catalogue of furniture' (TC 749.20493 BOO).