PRAHRAN ARCADE

Location

282-284 CHAPEL STREET PRAHRAN, STONNINGTON CITY

File Number

13/001833

Level

Registered

Statement of Significance

What is significant?
The Prahran Arcade, designed by local architect, George McMullen, and constructed by James McMullen, for Elizabeth Delaney, opened in July 1890. The two and three storey building originally comprised 29 ground floor shops and a hotel, complete with about 30 bedrooms, and a café, baths and billiard rooms on the upper floors. From the 1920s the building was known as the Centreway and from the 1960s to the turn of the century the whole building was used by wine merchant, Dan Murphy. The three storey street facade, designed in the Victorian Second Empire style features deep balconies and a profusion of elaborate cement decorative elements. The original mansard roof has been removed, a cantilevered street verandah added and the ground level facade altered. The lofty glazed gable roofed arcade has arching iron trusses and a pilastered blind upper storey. The arcade shopfronts have been removed.

How is it significant?
The Prahran Arcade is of architectural, aesthetic, historic, and social significance to the State of Victoria.

Why is it significant?
The Prahran Arcade is of architectural and aesthetic significance as a representative example of Victorian Second Empire architectural style applied to a suburban commercial building. The style's profusion of controlled elegant detail epitomises the excesses of late 19th century architecture in Victoria. The application of the style to the Prahran Arcade, which stood cheek by jowel with its neighbours, is unusual, because it was typically applied to more free-standing structures such as the Town Hall and Shamrock Hotel at Bendigo, and the former Records Office, Queen Street, Melbourne.

The Prahran Arcade is of architectural significance as a rare suburban example of a Victorian era shopping arcade.

The Prahran Arcade is of historic and social significance as its ambitious scale and opulent facade symbolise the confident exuberance of commerce in Melbourne during the boom of the late 1880s.

Group

Commercial

Category

Other - Commercial