March 2026

Further info on the Chapel Street store a couple of days ago – it was built for ‘the well known drapers’ Brown Corke & Co, who seem to have been mainly in the Goulburn Valley area. But more interesting is the date, I would have guessed 1905, with that great two tone Edwardian look and a dash of near east style – but it’s 1895!

A time when not much was being built due to the big crash of the early 1890s. Pic 3 is how it looked up to 2003, better than now but it was all painted.

The architect was Beverley Ussher, who was essentially one of the main inventors of the Edwardian / Queen Anne style house that became standard from the late 1890s, and his first foray was in 1891. But seems he was also an innovator in commercial work with this one, which I’d say influenced many later shops. The banded arches are a bit of early Edwardian Baroque, ultimately derived from the 8thC Moorish mosque in Cordoba Spain, reused as a church.

There’s one further down Chapel Street in Windsor which is pretty similar but I could never find a date. And others dotted around Melbourne like pics 6 and 7 in Bridge Road.

April 2026

And here’s another commercial project he did but not so innovative. This was a warehouse built for Beath Schiess & Co, ‘warehousemen’ in Flinders Lane some time between 1900 and 1907 (update probably 1904, Miles Lewis Index). It was designed by Ussher & Kemp, and pic 1 is their very fine rendering from the @nationallibraryaus (which mislabels it as Bourke Street, so took me a while to figure out it was actually built).

It’s a marvellous example of the tall-arched red brick Romanesque, a style dotted around the CBD, this one with projecting bay windows (like Ross House, 1899).

It was located where the back of the Regent Theatre is, so was demolished c1928, so only lasted maybe 20 years, no wonder I couldn’t find a good photo of it. It was next to an even larger warehouse built for the company in the 1860s I think, you could see it from Swanston Street before the current St Paul’s was built. That was refaced in modern style c1940 then finally demolished for the city square about 1970.

Pic 3 is an aerial from 1929 showing them, rather blurry, and the site behind is cleared for the Regent – for some reason this warehouse was the last to go.

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