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FORMER UNICORN HOTEL FACADE AND VERANDAH

Location 127 STURT STREET BALLARAT CENTRAL, BALLARAT CITY File Number PL-HE/03/0939 Level Registered

[1/3] FORMER UNICORN HOTEL FAÇADE [2/3] 1 unicorn hotel ballarat [3/3] Unicorn hotel plan

Statement of Significance

What is significant?
The facade and verandah of the former Unicorn Hotel at 127 Sturt Street, Ballarat, was built in or around 1863 or 1866 as a substantial brick facade to an earlier timber structure which had opened in 1856 as the Unicorn Hotel (Thomas Vaughan, publican), only the third hotel in the western part of Ballarat. The timber structure was soon replaced by the main building part of which has survived (The surviving elements of the main building have not been included in the Register save for the front 12 metres). The former Unicorn Hotel occupies a prominent location in Sturt Street with the western side of the building providing access to what became called Unicorn Lane or Passage. The design has been attributed to architects Caselli and Figgis. The verandah was elaborated in the 1880s to include cast iron work and a parapet adorned with a unicorn statue - long since removed. Upstairs the layout of rooms suggests the original use of the building as a hotel. The front room opens by way of French doors to the balcony.The external facade is composed on the upper floor of French doors surmounted by austerely detailed Renaissance hoods and consoles with a pediment over the central door. The building has a particularly elegant and early verandah and balcony which tend to overshadow the facade. It is a two storey version of the early single storey flat roofed and balustraded post verandah. The building ceased to operate as a licensed hotel from 1952, and the ground floor facade was compromised when replaced with glazed shop fronts.

How is it significant?
The facade and verandah of the former Unicorn Hotel in Sturt Street, Ballarat, is of cultural heritage significance to the State of Victoria for architectural, historical and social reasons and for the substantial contribution it makes to a notable nineteenth-century streetscape.

Why is it significant?
Architecturally, the facade and verandah of the former Unicorn Hotel is significant because of its status as part of one of Ballarat's oldest extant hotel buildings.The fine and elegant verandah and balcony are highly unusual in this form. This is the only remaining two storied parapeted verandah in Victoria. Slender cast iron columns with Corinthian capitals support ground floor brackets, swag bellied balcony panels, double timber bressumer with frieze iron inserts, cornice and brackets. Much of this detail is in place and is of high aesthetic value. The now flat surfaced parapet originally had an elaborate set of balusters with a unicorn statue mounted centrally. The aesthetic contribution of the facade and verandah to its notable Sturt Street environment is substantial.

Historically and socially the former Unicorn Hotel is significant because of its role in the life of Ballarat and of Victoria since the gold rushes of the 1850s. Known as 'The Corner', the Unicorn adjoined the Mining Exchange and the building accommodated offices for stock brokers and share traders from the 1860s until the late 1880s and was a popular gathering point at times of intense share speculation as was the street outside the Hotel. Although the ground floor has been substantially altered, the continuing existence of the Sturt Street frontage illustrates the general association of the hotel with mining speculation in the nineteenth century, and endow the structure with important historical associations. (See Anthony Trollope's description of trading in mining shares "under the verandah" in Trollope's Australia. ed. Hume Dow, 1966)