27 April 2025

This very unusual place once stood in Albert Street East Melbourne, a very elaborate and rare example of the Moorish or Mogul style, a bit Alhambra, a bit Taj Mahal, a lot Victorian invention. It was overlaid as a verandah on an earlier house in about 1877, and might have been designed by Charles Webb (all this comes from excellent research by the East Melbourne Historical Society).

It was built for John Gotch, of what became the big printing and publishing house of Gordon & Gotch. He died here in 1901, when it was described as ‘picturesque’, and his widow remained until 1914. Later it became flats, known as Burnell, and was demolished for an expansion of the Freemasons Hospital in 1969. This is of course when Victorian stuff was seen as terribly bad taste and well before there was such a thing as heritage listing.

Side note : if an article from 1890 is correct, the architect was William Henry Rasche, an eccentric and unsuccessful inventor, artist and architect, seems this was the only outstanding thing he ever did – he lived in a studio on his own, and was discovered on 22 March 1890 having been dead for a fortnight, “his open eyes glaring fixedly upon the cage where his canary still blinked at its dead master through the putrid atmosphere” 😮 Fist photo facebook, then @library_vic, and demo pics from @uqgroup library, where you can clearly see the quoined corner of the earlier house.

• Uncategorized