Melbourne's Hilton holds onto unique building heritage

Along with many other Canberra homes, Oakley and Parkes conceived The Lodge in 1927. In an elegant interweaving of several different stylistic fashions popular at the beginning of the Depression, they made the 1930-31 Equity Trustees building as a mix of Romanesque, art deco, moderne and even, says heritage expert Peter Lovell, “a bit of Gothic.  

“It’s very eclectic, but it has a wonderful unity”.

As the main road face, lobby, dining room, lift foyer and some of the atmospheric accommodation corridors of an international hotel giant like the Hilton chain, the original parts of the building present a distinct Melbourne experience for guests and visitors, who check in and then progress through a seamless time portal into the new 17-storey rear tower that was designed by Bates Smart.

With such an unusually large portion of the primary structure so intact, however, “it still reads very much as the historical building”, says Lovell, co-founder of Lovell Chen Architects.  

But for the interference of the lawyer types who’d maintained upstairs offices in the Trustees building until it was purchased in the last decade by a developer with ambitions to make it over for modern city residential, the Equity building might have emerged from any sort of makeover with a much more compromised character.

In 2018, when the first adaptive reuse development application was lodged to alter the 472-478 Bourke Street-Queens Lane corner building, it only had local heritage status. That means the city council saw it as important but not necessarily a heritage hill any other listing authority would die on. 

The resident legals, however, immediately drew the Equity Trustees building to the potentially much toothier attention of Heritage Victoria. And even though it did eventually gain a permit from them for the raising of a rear tower, it also gained higher state heritage protection.

The recent 244-room rear structure and the restored sections of the building opened for business in the lockdown quietude of early 2021. In mid-2022, the project won the Victorian Chapter Architects’ award for Heritage – Creative Adaptions. The jury loved the project for the way it “captured an embedded social history”.

The rhapsodic praise for both Bates Smart and Lovell Chen, went on to talk about the “insightful architectural judgement … the meticulous reconstructions” and concluded by saying that “Melbourne is all the richer for this project”.

It certainly is. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that an unusually generous 30-metre depth in some parts of the building has been retained and expertly restored. Peter Lovell explains that depth allowed for keeping intact “the main commercial space that is like one of those wonderful, large Melbourne banking chambers so that as you move into the building, you get a huge sense of what it was.

“Having retrieved the main space that had been chopped up, you get to understand its particular volumetric form and its original detail and nature”.

Lovell is full of praise for the Hilton Hotels’ management “embracing the proposition of a hotel presenting and enjoying its heritage fabric. And full marks to Bates Smart for the subtle, sophisticated transition to the new building.

“I think the real win here is that it is a lot more than just a facade. It’s a serious three-dimensional form, and there is a real delight in transitioning through a heritage space into a 21st-century space. It’s been a really successful project”.