THE HISTORY OF 175 COLLINS STREET -
KURRAJONG HOUSE

Kurrajong House forms part of a row of elegant shops and office buildings on a steep rise in Collins Street, east of Swanston Street. This part of Collins Street with its mature trees that create a canopy of vegetation over the thoroughfare and its gracious buildings, which include Kurrajong House, have contributed in giving this part of the street a distinct European flavour that Melburnians have come to refer to as the Paris End of Collins Street.

Early Collins Street

Collins Street is Melbourne’s best-known and most fashionable street. It is lined with some of the city’s most beautiful buildings, many of which house major cultural, social and commercial institutions. While the west end of Collins Street developed a distinctly commercial character with imposing office buildings of banks and insurance companies, east of Swanston Street it developed with a more eclectic, yet genteel, character. Housed in its many grand buildings are some of Melbourne’s most important institutions including churches and private clubs, and nestled amongst them are up-market retailers and the consulting rooms of doctors and dentists. Kurrajong House has itself housed many of these institutions, which have played a key role in the shaping of Melbourne’s cultural and social history.

By the late nineteenth century, the block of Collins Street, between Swanston and Russell Streets, had three churches. The Collins Street Baptist Church and Scots Church survive today, but on land to the east of Kurrajong House, now the site of the Auditorium Building, was St Enoch’s Presbyterian Church. Built in 1850, it was designed by the architects James Blackburn (junior) and Arthur Newson. This finely detailed Gothic Revival bluestone church, with its tall spire above its entrance, was a landmark in Melbourne for many years.

Collins Street c1930 looking west from Russell Street. Kurrajong House is partially visible at left (State Library of Victoria Picture Collection).

Early photographs and drawings of St Enoch’s show to its west a modest three-storey building occupying what was to become the site of Kurrajong House. This building housed an auctioneer and estate agent. Another occupant of this building was a Walter Rose, who was a surgeon and dentist. To its west was a smaller two-storey building that also occupied the site of Kurrajong House. The surgeon and dentist, John Iliffe, occupied this building. These buildings formed part of a larger group of commercial premises in this part of Collins Street that housed a variety of businesses including the offices of two of Melbourne’s daily newspapers The Herald and The Argus.

Collins Street looking west from the Russell Street corner in 1875. The spire of St Enoch’s is partially visible at left, and beyond the church are the buildings that formerly occupied the site of Kurrajong House (State Library of Victoria Picture Collection).

While the north side of Collins Street in this block retains much of its Victorian character, the south side of this part of Collins Street experienced tremendous development in the first few decades of the twentieth century. St Enoch’s Church was demolished in 1911 and on its site was built the Auditorium Building, which contained a concert hall on its ground floor and offices on its upper levels. Kurrajong House was part of a wave of development that occurred in the next decade, which also included the completion of the first stage of the T&G Building (1928) at the Russell Street corner and the Regent Theatre (1929).

An MMBW plan of Collins Street of 1895 showing the buildings on the south side of the street, west of Russell Street. The footprints of the buildings that occupied the future site of Kurrajong house (No’s 173 and 175) are to the west of St Enoch’s Presbyterian Church, which is marked with a cross (State Library of Victoria Map Collection).

Kurrajong House

Kurrajong House was built in 1926-27 for the concert, film and theatrical entrepreneurs, J & N Tait, who, for over seventy years, brought to Australia some of the best of the world’s musical and theatrical entertainment. Taits owned several city properties including the adjacent Auditorium Building. The Argus reported in March 1926 of Tait’s intention to construct Kurrajong House, which was to contain an arcade of shops on its ground floor and showrooms and offices on its upper levels. In June of that year Melbourne City Council granted a permit for the erection of the building, which is described in Council records as ‘shops and offices’ valued at 47,000 pounds.

The architects of Kurrajong House, R M & M H King, had Adelaide origins, where Ray Maurice King began practicing as an architect in 1891. The following year he moved to Melbourne and over the next sixty years he and his son, Maurice Harrington King, who he went into partnership with in 1926, designed many industrial and residential buildings in Victoria. Maurice, who was trained as an engineer, is regarded as having transformed the fledgling practice established by his father into one of Melbourne’s most prolific architectural firms of the mid-twentieth century.

Kurrajong House is one of the few buildings in central Melbourne designed by the Kings. Other commercial work undertaken by the firm includes the showroom for the Colonial Gas Company at Box Hill and the Hopkins Odlum Apex Belting factory at Footscray. R M & M H King designed many houses in the Tudor Revival, Mediterranean and Bungalow styles that were popular in the 1920s and 30s, however their Moderne, or Art Deco, housing of the 1930s is regarded as some of the best examples of this style in Melbourne. Many of the firm’s clients were high profile Victorians including, in addition to the Taits, Arthur Rylah, lawyer and later Chief Secretary and Deputy Premier of Victoria; the Myttons and Beaurepaires. Other significant works include the Knox Presbyterian Church in Ivanhoe (1927), a small building at 125 Collins Street for the Rue de la Paix frock shop (1937) and Noble Park Presbyterian Church (1956). Ray King died in the early 1950s. Maurice King died prematurely in 1956 and the practice was closed shortly afterwards.

R M & M H King designed the nine-storey Kurrajong House in a Commercial Palazzo-style, which was popular for commercial buildings in Melbourne in the 1920s. The Commercial Palazzo-style is derived from Renaissance palace design, where the façade has three distinct elements: base and attic levels that are heavily ornamented, and intermediate floors faced with less decoration. A similar treatment has been applied to other buildings in this block including the adjacent Auditorium and T&G Buildings. All of these are built to the 132 feet height limit of that time: a statutory measure that was introduced to ensure buildings did not overshadow neighbouring streets and that fire ladders could reach upper levels in the event of a fire. The modest scale of these buildings, combined with their finely detailed decoration, tended to give them what has been termed ‘good manners’ in how they interact with street.

The restrained use of decoration on Kurrajong House shows the emerging trend of stripping back decoration, which would reach its zenith in the 1930s with the introduction of Modernism to Melbourne. Despite the restrained use of ornamentation, Kurrajong House is a well proportioned and detailed building, with its central canted-bay windows on its upper levels a distinct and relatively unique feature on a Melbourne building. Kurrajong House’s stepped cantilevered verandah over Collins Street was not part of the original design, but was added as an afterthought during construction. The verandah was also designed by R M & M H King and further enhanced the appearance of the stylish ground floor shops of this building.