Grubby to glitz: St Kilda’s housing rollercoaster

By Ray Edgar

July 23, 2023 — 5.00am

A heart-starter at the Prince of Wales hotel in St Kilda once meant a breakfast beer in the sepulchral public bar. Now it’s hard to discern which gives the bigger 10am jolt – the coffee and danish, the streamlined minimalist interior, or the lack of barflies.

Here, amid this newly gentrified art deco establishment, architectural historian David Brand explains the rationale behind his upcoming walking tour of St Kilda’s rich and varied flat designs, and the suburb’s mercurial character, as part of this year’s Open House Melbourne program.

Architectural historian David Brand outside one of his favourite blocks of flats on The Esplanade.Credit: Simon Schluter

“St Kilda is Melbourne’s laboratory,” says Brand. “Different types of flats were experimented here. You can see a social economic rollercoaster going all through the story of flats. I picture a psycho-real-estate graph. Most of Melbourne feared St Kilda since crime and depravity established itself in the 1930s and went right through the 1980s.”

The rollercoaster begins and ends with gentrification. During the late 1800s, St Kilda had more mansions per square metre than anywhere else in Melbourne. “After the depression of the 1890s, mansions were half empty and started falling apart,” Brand says.“By the 1920s, a large proportion were subdivided into flats and by the Great Depression of the 1930s they were these huge rabbit warrens with dozens of families crammed into them.”

They had become mansions in name only. “It became the lowest rent place in Melbourne. Thanks largely to the Great Depression, St Kilda went from respectable to not respectable. Until the 1990s there has been a prejudice against flats in the general culture of Melbourne. It was always viewed with some degree of suspicion and moral jeopardy.”

The Canterbury , one of the earliest purpose-built blocks of self-contained apartments.Credit: Rodger Cummins

With the highest density of flats, St Kilda became the home for outcasts and refugees: homosexuals, sex workers, immigrants, the poor, artists and punks escaping the stultifying conservatism of the suburbs. Brand was one of them.

For 40 years the architect has lived in this suburb by the sea, helped fight for its renowned Esplanade Hotel, been a two-term deputy mayor of council and identified its heritage-worthy sites.

“It’s the most beautiful place in Melbourne,” he enthuses. “It’s got sea, fantasy architecture, Mediterranean landscapes. It had everything. It was cheap. It was a huge village of punk culture. It felt like a strange utopia.”

Brand’s tour focuses on St Kilda Hill, the ridge that runs between St Kilda junction, Alma Road and the Esplanade Hotel. Fittingly perhaps, Brand’s rollercoaster tour begins at the former St Kilda train station. From this crossroads vantage point one can look across to two pre-World War I flat types.

Open House Melbourne highlights

Melbourne Recital Centre For five minutes, feel free to take the stage and explore the acoustics of one of the world’s greatest halls. Only 18 tickets are available to sing, play, meditate, recite a poem, or simply sit within its hoop pine interior and experience Elisabeth Murdoch Hall alone.

Designing with Country The authors of Plants: Past, Present and Future (part of the First Knowledges series) discuss what landscape architects can learn from First Nations people.

Heritage Address From the demolition of Flinders Street Station and Town Hall to planners’ obsessions with underground tunnels, historian Michael Veitch recounts some of the bizarre proposals for Melbourne in the annual Heritage Council of Victoria address. Followed by a Q+A with Professor Philip Goad.

Victorian Pride Centre While on the St Kilda Flat Life tour, visit the award-winning Victorian Pride Centre by Brearley Architects and Urbanists & Grant Amon Architects, the first purpose-built centre for Australia’s LGBTIQ+ communities.

Like a stack of small houses piled on top of one another, the four-storey Canterbury, built by the Tompkins brothers in 1914, offers one apartment per floor. “It’s a simplistic view of how to do flats,” says Brand. Diagonally across Fitzroy Street past the George Hotel, home of the legendary music venue the Seaview Ballroom, is the massive Majestic, whose art nouveau and Edwardian features have been steadily eroded since it was built in 1912.

The art deco Del Marie apartments in St Kilda.Credit: David Brand

The nearby interwar period Banff building demonstrates the influence of modernism, with reinforced concrete balconies. Yet it retains a touch of art deco styling on its stairwell. “When they experiment with modernism you’ll get this,” says Brand. “They couldn’t leave it undecorated. It’s like not wearing a tie.”

Building names reflect the era in typography but also popular period associations: grand seaside resorts and famous hotels like the Majestic, Waldorf and Ritz Mansions. Unsurprisingly for a suburb named after an island off Scotland, many names bear Scottish roots such as Strathmore, Eildon and Banff. Meanwhile, Brand suspects the San Diego, with its stripped back art deco style, takes its name from San Diegan architect Irving J. Gill.

Big-name architects and developers like the prolific Howard R. Lawson began his career in St Kilda with Arts and Crafts-inspired flats featuring roughcast concrete, timber shingles and exposed carpentry, while postmodern architects Williams Boag are represented with an apartment complex designed around the Uniting Church that Brand likens to a feudal village.

A laneway in St Kilda was named or local musician Roland S. Howard in 2015.Credit: Justin McManus

Naturally, the chronology of buildings is jumbled. Yet in a suburb of immense architectural variety Eildon Road’s run of cream brick apartments sparks a discussion on the merits of architectural cohesion. “I find these streets with buildings from around same time a little boring, but when you start looking, you see the little differences,” he says, pointing out streamlined window features and plaited English brickwork around archways. “Coherence is important, but so is variety,” he adds. “There are different values that are all valid, which are opposite each other. Plurality is great, unity is great. It’s how you pick and choose.”

Some sites are more interesting socially than architecturally. As we wend our way down Rowland S. Howard Lane and behind the Prince of Wales Hotel, Brand points to “piss alley” opposite a nondescript house where ’80s bands performed at backyard parties, the lane handy for junkies making a quick getaway.

Marli Place, with its quirky “diving board” staircases.Credit: Helfa Salwe

Re-emerging at the Prince, we make our way around the esplanade. Past Bayside, with its chocolate-brick flats stepped back to give everyone a view. Past Marli Place terraces, with its quirky diving board stairs. Past the hard-fought battleground of the Esplanade Hotel and its elegant outcome of wavelike apartments rising above. Taking in the bay view, Brand arrives back at the subject of gentrification.

“In the ’90s the public lost its fear of both apartments and St Kilda,” he says. “Somehow fear versus fascination crossed paths. It coincided with the rise of apartment living in the CBD. Suddenly rents and properties went up because they were sought after.”

Now the suburb is largely gentrified. “Not for the better,” Brand believes. “It’s lost a lot of character. There’s less eccentricity. It was the densest suburb in Melbourne. It’s become less dense ever since.”

One hundred years after being a millionaires’ playground, St Kilda was rediscovered by the rich. St Moritz is emblematic of the change. The multimillion-dollar luxury apartments are a “temple to exclusivity,” Brand says. “It’s not unexpected. It’s just a pity that [St Kilda’s] shed so much interesting and intense history to end up back as exclusive.”

Flat Life: St Kilda Hill and the History of Flats in Melbourne, part of Open House Melbourne 2023: Collective City, various locations, July 29-30; openhousemelbourne.org

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