Mitchell House, Melbourne CBD
Nearly ninety years later, it’s still there. The building is home to rusted-on tenants and more recent inhabitants who, in their different ways, call it home. Since December 2024, we have been lucky enough to count ourselves as one of this group. Having long admired Mitchell House’s architecture and the sense of ongoing community fostered within it, we were thrilled when a tiny shopfront became available at its entrance.
Mitchell House is a striking and beautiful building which, when taken in from afar, seems to be caught in the act of launching itself skyward. Its curved corners wrap around steel-framed windows, while incised speed lines (a signature flourish of Streamline Moderne style) streak horizontally across its façade. Fluted piers draw the eye upward, to where the name “Mitchell House” appears in gilded letters. As a structure, it communicates velocity, while standing perfectly still.
That feeling of upward movement is, in one sense, deeply appropriate: Mitchell House was never finished. Commissioned by the Mitchell Brush Company and designed in 1936 by Harry Norris (one of the first Australian architects to introduce Art Deco to major commercial projects, and the same hand responsible for the Nicholas Building a few blocks away) the original plans called for a ten-storey tower, rising to the then-maximum permissible height of forty metres. As The Argus reported in September 1936: “The building which has been designed for the site will be of reinforced concrete and steel, rising to 10 stories.” That plan never came to fruition, as by the time construction was complete in 1937, only six floors had been built. The second stage was quietly abandoned.
That truncated ambition is almost invisible now. What remains is not a fragment but a finished object, a perfectly resolved composition in the Streamline Moderne idiom: that is, the first architectural style to incorporate electric light into its very structure, in buildings that were designed, self-consciously, to look like the future. In 1987, Mitchell House was classified by the National Trust and two decades later, in 2010, it was added to the Victorian Heritage Register. These designations protect what is, architecturally speaking, one of the finest surviving examples of its style in Australia.
On first entering Mitchell House, you walk past its wrought iron gates and barrel-vaulted foyer ceiling and cross a terrazzo floor. Then, after pressing a button and waiting, waiting for the lift, you are shifted up upstairs to the office floors, whose hallways are comparatively bare and utilitarian – an interesting contrast with the well-trodden, ornate entrance hall.
Rick Milovanovic and Tristian Ceddia
“I feel a sense of pride when I tell people where we come to work every day… I love it here.”
Tristan Ceddia of TRiC Studio has been in Mitchell House for fifteen years and paints its character with all the vividity of a residential neighbourhood: “There’s Dr. David the acupuncturist on level 2, Marty at the camera shop across the hall, Antuong and Sam next door who I originally shared a space with. More recently, Tom and Taiki moved in, to our right, Dean the lawyer at the end of the hall and a friend of mine, Suzy, downstairs.”
Pressed on his relationship to the building’s history, Tristan says: “I feel a sense of pride when I tell people where we come to work every day… I love it here. Some time ago, when I told my pop where I work, he told me that he would travel from Euroa to Mitchell House when he was a kid to sell possum pelts with his uncle.”
He remembers Despina and her husband, an elderly Greek couple who ran a small tuck shop in the entrance for years. “They had a small fridge with drinks, made delicious sandwiches, and sold small packets of chips. When they moved out, there was a real shift in the tone of that space.”
Marty working on a camera
Vince working on a camera
Marty at Vintech Camera Service Centre has been in the building since 1996, although owner Vince opened the shop two years earlier. That makes them among the longest-standing tenants – something which gives Marty’s reminisces a certain authority.
“Back in the nineties, the building looked very different,” he tells us. “It was carpeted everywhere. And there was far less foot traffic, far fewer people.” As you can imagine, as such a longstanding business, they’ve seen it all. He says, “In the nineties everything changed over to digital, but now there’s been this huge resurgence, where we’re probably sixty percent film again.” He laughs, “and luckily, now we have stronger coffee.”
What’s changed most, Marty says, is density. Where once a floor might hold a single lawyer who saw a client or two per day, or be used for storage, now every level is a hive of small studios and shared offices, each with their own rotating cast of collaborators: “You have multiple businesses on every floor… you’ve got the record shop, drawing people in. You have the Japanese bunny shop on level four. There are just way more people.”
The building’s longer history is patchier in Marty’s recollection. He admits he doesn’t think about it much, day to day, but he has a feeling for what’s been lost in the immediate surroundings. “Back in the nineties, you could see all the market rooftops, before they developed the buildings across Elizabeth Street. This was quite a substantial building then. Now we’re just very small.”
As for the full sweep of its tenants across the decades: “Everybody’s been through this building,” Marty says. “From underworld lawyers to shoe shops, you name it.” For thirty years… Nick and Despina ran that cafe, but it’s gone now” – along with a great deal else.
Taiki Monden and Thomas Benson
The upper floors have become, in recent years, something like a creative precinct unto themselves. SODAA (Studio of Design and Art, run by Thomas Benson and Taiki Monden), arrived around two years ago, after Thomas and Taiki spent the better part of a year trying to get a foot in the door. “We got lucky,” Taiki says. “I think it’s pretty hard to dig into a place like this.” What they found, upon arrival, was a floor of studios and co-working spaces in close proximity, with architects, interior designers, and various other disciplines pressing up against each other. They made the space their own, starting with a large, custom metal door.
Despite these personal touches (often in the shape of a bespoke door), the tenants of Mitchell House are united by the knowledge that their tenure here is, by definition, contingent. This is a heritage-listed building in the heart of the Melbourne CBD, and its future doesn’t rest in the hands of one person. Standing on the corner, surveying the towers that surround it, you understand quickly that Mitchell House’s survival as a place for small, creative businesses is provisional.
“The building, yeah,” Thomas begins, and then pauses, “I feel like we’re on a timeline. These beautiful buildings – they don’t feel like they’ll be here forever.” He compares it to the Nicholas Building – another Norris design, another heritage-listed address that has served as a creative hub for Melburnians for decades.
The building changed hands in 2024. For most tenants the transition was unremarkable, taking place through emails and management. What it did bring was the departure of the old maintenance man, a figure who had acquired, in the collective memory of the building, something close to mythic status. He was, by most accounts, not easy; chain-smoking cigarettes on the footpath and pacing the stairs with proprietary authority. But he was always there, and his presence meant that Mitchell House felt, however imperfectly, looked after.
“You need someone like that,” Thomas reflects. “You need to feel like the building has its guardian angel. We very much felt that for sure.”
“Everybody’s been through this building. From underworld lawyers to shoe shops, you name it.”
In June, Rocksteady Records will have been in Mitchell House for ten years. Owner Pat Monaghan moved in during 2016, with the intention that whatever was built in the shop should honour what was already there: “We could’ve easily just knocked up a pop-up style record store,” he observes, “but that would have been disrespectful in lots of ways.” Instead, he installed proper cabinetry and storage, refurbishing “everything you see in here, except the floor – that’s the original, from 1933.” Pat’s partner, Jay Magee, runs the hair salon directly across the hallway – Off The Top Of My Head – which gives their corridor the feeling of a small, self-contained street, as doors stand mostly ajar and the sounds of each business escape from their open thresholds.
Harking back, Pat remembers the entertainment lawyer Andrew Fuller, who once worked directly above the record shop, representing musicians including Kim Salmon and CW Stoneking. “But they’re not here anymore,” he says, without any particular sadness. On the question of memory – who might remember the building’s past best – he recalled a man who had worked on the fourth floor as an architect, whose father had worked there before him, as a draftsman in a fully open-plan office. Mitchell House, like many longstanding commercial spaces, can have this effect; where one generation of occupants is folded into the next, continuing the generational narratives of a family while absorbing them into the story of the place itself.
When we opened our smallest shop at the ground floor of Mitchell House, we wanted to honour the building’s position as a place where the many lines of Melbourne’s commercial and creative lives have come together, across nearly a century of occupation.
We looked to make the space as warm and luminous as possible – with soft colours, brass fixtures, and the Fleur pendant light from Volker Haug & Flack Studio – because it seemed the right way of honouring and refiguring the building’s own peculiar warmth.
Mitchell House is, in the imagination of its occupants, always slightly impermanent. And yet, it has stood on this corner for nearly ninety years. It has outlasted the brush company that commissioned it, the lawyers and shoe shops and Greek cafes that filled its floors. It stands at six storeys when it was supposed to reach ten, and somehow that incompleteness became its form, in a building that communicates ambition and frustrated motion at the same time. We are so proud to be a small part of its living, continuous history, and to serve the community that inhabits and surrounds it.
This interview appears in the Winter 2026 edition of our Print Journal, which is available in shops and online now.