12 December 2023

Expected to find this one particularly horrible, but somehow at least when closer you focus on the restored facades of the 1925 Metropolitan Hotel on William Street, rather than the huge black tower above it. They also did a good job with reinstating the corner windows, the new brickwork matches fine. This was a product of the building not even being heritage listed at the time, plus the ‘as of right’ 80m build to boundaries on corners, which has led to the few remaining city corner pubs to get towers, though the King St Great Western tower hasn’t happened yet. Heritage rules now mandate keeping the ‘front or principle portion’, rather than just the external walls, with no cantilevering, but too late for so many places.

Original post 8 Feb 2021:

This is one that honestly I can’t even bear to look at – which VCAT thought was fine ! And unfortunately going ahead whereas many other much more acceptable ones arnt. It’s a 20 storey office tower plonked over the retained and restored upper facades of the 1925 Metropolitan Hotel in William Street. It wasn’t #heritagelisted when the tower was first proposed in 2018, but now it is proposed to be (too late!) so this is the compromise result. I told Council it should be have protected back in 2011 when all three little old buildings around it were proposed individually, but they ‘weren’t looking at precincts’ dammit! An excellent lane with a very old warehouse down the back too. It’s just painful.

The developer is Colin DeLutis, who does pubs, office refurbs and small shopping centres, and the architects are @wmkarchitecture, who say that “WMK has created an architectural response that not only reflects the modernization of a city but has revived and redefined the pub experience to give it life and viability for the next 100 years.”. Images : WMK, me 2011, c1972, @library_vic.

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