national pride developing our city \ A dying pub gets a breath of new life.
S
tep through the red door into the National Hotel and you will be forgiven if you can’t remember where you are. The attentive service has taken cues from Japan: immediate smiles and a warm greeting within two steps of entering. The design screams industrial China: unpainted concrete and steel cages around the bar. The menu is crammed with hawker-style street food, from kimchi pancakes to Cantonese steak and there is … an opium den. This is the reimagined National Hotel on Victoria Street, Richmond, a pub that has recently been transformed from sticky carpet and smoke-stained walls into a formidable superpower in the rise of gastro-pubs in Melbourne. The new owners of the National are a team of Melbourne bar veterans who already have stakes in the Corner Hotel, the Northcote Social Club and Riverland on the banks of the Yarra. For the final six months of 2011, they closed the pub’s doors and called in sustainability experts, Breathe Architecture. Jeremy McLeod, of Breathe, says the National has undergone a renovation every decade since it opened in 1906. “With each renovation it got worse and worse,” he says. “By the time we got to it, it lacked any sense of style or warmth and it was occupied by very, very few local customers who were only here out of loyalty.” Owner Minh Nguyen is not so tough. She
kindly suggests it “had good bones” but it did need a lot of work. Breathe took a lighthearted approach when trying to conceptualise how the new National would look. It drew upon the cultural heritage of the area, from the west end of Victoria Street and Vietnamese pho, to the home makers’ corner of Swedish Ikea in the east. “We were trying to understand Victoria Street and how our site sat within that weird topography,” says McLeod. “We decided that if you are flying from Vietnam to Sweden, the place that’s in the middle is China.” The concept was born, heralding a reinvention. “At Breathe we are reductionists,” says McLeod. This means the National is even more impressive, not for what was put in, but what was left out. In the course of the transformation it used no plasterboards, no sanding, no paint, no chrome, no aluminum and it installed no air-conditioning. There are no ceramic tiles (too many carbon miles), and no carpet. To bring its theme to life, Breathe divided the venue into five “provinces”. First, there is the café, or the Shanghai province. This light-filled area, like Shanghai, the import-export capital of China, allows patrons to sit indoors or outdoors, providing a space to look outward onto Victoria street. Next is the booth seating, like the city of Shenzhen. McLeod explains it “is all concrete and steel”. The booths are fashioned from leftover flooring and
tarpaulin and are spacious enough to squeeze in a horde of drinkers. Nestled in the corner is the opium den, designed for the recluses among us. It is made from a series of milk crates tied together with black rope and upholstery. The dining room is like Hong Kong. It is prepared for monsoonal seasons, offering the ability to enclose or expose the area, depending on the weather. The last “province” of the pub is the courtyard, or
iPhone & iPad apps are now available! Searching for property on the go just got easier! reviewproperty.com.au’s free iPhone & iPad app allows you to search for properties to buy, rent or share, no matter where you are. With 400,000 listings and growing, download the FREE app today!
Now available at iPhone & iPad is a registered trade mark of apple Inc, registered in the U. S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple, Inc. 38 The weekly review \ december 12, 2012