Melbourne’s CBD, building by building.

Flinders House is a prominent example of 19th-century commercial architecture — a six-story former warehouse on bluestone footings, remodelled in 1870 into an Italian Renaissance Palazzo to the design of architect Charles Webb, with Turnbull & Dick as the builders, for clothing manufacturers Banks Brothers Bell & Co. The building is reported to have been extended upward by Billing & Peck around 1905, and was refurbished into sixty residential apartments in 2000.

17 Spring Street stands on the site of the Mercure Melbourne Treasury Gardens, a hotel that was demolished to make way for it. In its place the developer Cbus Property and the architecture firm Bates Smart built a 128-metre residential tower, completed in 2023. It was purpose-built as apartments — large two- and three-bedroom residences, some taking half or a whole floor — facing the Treasury Gardens opposite.

35 Spring Street is a 44-storey apartment tower at the eastern edge of the Hoddle Grid, opposite the Treasury Gardens. It was built between 2014 and 2017 by the architecture firm Bates Smart for the developer Cbus Property, on a site that had held an office complex. The patterned aluminium facade refers to the woven fabrics of Flinders Lane's nineteenth-century rag trade. A sculpture by Inge King, kept from the earlier building, stands in the lift lobby.

Centro Apartments started life as Gypsum House, an eleven-storey office building completed in 1968 to a design by the architecture firm Bogle & Banfield & Associates. Its concrete front is made up of repeating window panels with rounded corners. The offices were refurbished and converted into apartments in 1994.

Clyde House was built in 1915 to a design by Nahum Barnet, the architect of the nearby Auditorium, with Jacobean detailing across its street façade. It started life as offices — the Australian Motor Car Exchange was an early tenant — and was later subdivided into apartments. It stands within the historic Collins Street precinct.

Collins Arch was built on the block where Melbourne's first official produce market once stood, and later a modernist 1965 office building that was demolished in the mid-2010s. The current building was completed in 2020 to a joint design by the architecture firms Woods Bagot and SHoP Architects, developed by Cbus Property in a $1.25 billion project. It is two glass towers joined by an eight-level sky bridge, holding apartments, the W Melbourne hotel and offices.

This corner building on Russell and Mackenzie Streets was built in 1888-89 as police offices, by the contractor Thomas Corley for Victoria's Public Works Department, on a site the police had used since the 1850s. When the headquarters next door was rebuilt in the 1940s, wartime shortages stopped the work, and this two-storey wing survived. It was later converted to apartments.

The Victorian Cricket Association, then the state's main cricket body, built this corner building at Flinders and Exhibition Streets in 1924-25 to a design by H. Croxton Davey. It was a commercial building: the association kept the top floor for its own offices and let the other floors and the ground-level shops to tenants. It was converted to apartments in 1993, with shops kept at street level.

Ashdowne House is a distinguished example of early 20th-century architecture. Built in 1940 in the Neo-Georgian style, it originally functioned as an office building with basement and ground-level retail spaces, before being thoughtfully converted into 14 residential units in the late 1990s.

Bible House is a notable Edwardian-era heritage building on Flinders Lane that reflects Melbourne's rich historical tapestry. Originally constructed in the early 1900s and refurbished with the addition of a top level in 1994, the building once served as a hub for religious and community activities.

Bourke Hill Apartments is a contemporary residential building of 28 apartments completed in 1983, perched in the Bourke Hill precinct at the eastern end of the city. Sleek lines and premium amenities give it a sophisticated urban presence, with sweeping views of Parliament Hill and the city beyond.

Built in 1909-10 as a warehouse and cigarette factory for the tobacco firm Sniders and Abrahams, this was the first building in Australia to use the Turner Mushroom System of flat-slab reinforced concrete. The engineer and architect Hugh Ralston Crawford designed it as five storeys and added two more in 1938. It later housed Dover's Printery, which gave it its name, and was converted to apartments in the 1990s.

The Herald Sun Building, originally the Herald and Weekly Times Building, is a Neo-Classical Beaux Arts landmark on Flinders Street. Designed by HW & FB Tomkins and constructed in stages between 1921 and 1928 by Clements Langford, it served as the headquarters of the Herald newspaper for nearly a century.

Hero Apartments was built in 1948-54 as the Russell Street Automatic Telephone Exchange and Postal Building, designed by the Commonwealth Department of Works, the federal government's own public-works office. It held a public postal hall and the automatic equipment switching thousands of Melbourne telephone lines. From 1999 to 2001 the architect Nonda Katsalidis, then practising as Nation Fender Katsalidis, converted it to apartments and added six storeys above the original roof.

Leicester House is a Gothic-style Victorian commercial warehouse from 1886, in the Flinders Lane precinct off Bligh Place. Its deep cornices and distinctive Florentine arches on the upper level give it one of the most striking façades on the laneway, and it now houses 20 unique private residences.

The Majorca Building is the kind of building that makes you look up and wonder. Rising eight storeys above Flinders Lane in a cascade of deep blue faience, its facade is unlike anything else in Melbourne — a Moorish fantasy of fish, shells, rope moulding, and gold detailing dreamed up by Harry Norris and completed in 1930. It was built for the Nicholas brothers, the same Aspro magnates behind the nearby Nicholas Building, and named for the Spanish island of Majorca.

Manchester House was built in 1911–1912 to a design by the architecture firm Bates, Peebles & Smart, for the Adelaide clothing manufacturers G & R Wills and Company, marking their entry into the Melbourne clothing industry then centred on Flinders Lane. Built as a warehouse, showroom and offices for the clothing trade, it later took in retail and was converted to include apartments above the lower office floors.

Its Gothic spires have punctuated the city skyline since 1932, and the Manchester Unity Building remains the most recognisable silhouette at Melbourne's busiest intersection. Designed by Marcus Barlow for the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows, it was built in an astonishing eleven months and twelve days — constructed around the clock in eight-hour shifts during the depths of the Depression. The result is Melbourne's answer to the Chicago Tribune Tower: a soaring commercial Gothic landmark that proved the city's ambition hadn't dimmed.

Designed by Harry Norris — the architect behind the Majorca Building — Mitchell House is a striking Art Deco landmark on Lonsdale Street. Its streamlined facade and decorative details make it one of Melbourne's finest examples of interwar modernism.

QT Melbourne is the reinvention of the original Greater Union Cinema (opened 1978), a building once celebrated for its red-and-gold grand foyer, striking ceilings, and crystal chandeliers. The cinema closed in October 2013 and the building was reborn as QT Melbourne — a designer hotel inspired by the 1920s rag traders that defined the Paris End.

Sackville House is a six-storey brick and concrete warehouse at the eastern end of Flinders Lane, built before 1934. It was occupied by the clothing manufacturer John Sackville Pty Ltd until 1934, when the firm moved out and the building was sold; the name, used informally, traces to that tenant. It was later converted to apartments, with two floors added on top, to a design by John Wardle.

Sargood House is an eight-story concrete warehouse on Flinders Lane, designed by Godfrey & Spowers and constructed by Hansen & Yunken in 1929 for Sargood Gardiner Ltd. A top storey was added in 1936, and a Wood Marsh-led conversion in 1998 turned the upper floors into residential apartments while preserving the building's industrial bones.

The Sheraton Private Residences sit at the Paris End of Little Collins Street within a 32-storey mixed-use tower that grew from an early 20th-century commercial heritage shell. The building features 142 residential apartments alongside 44 luxury residences and penthouses on the top six floors.

Shocko House is a six-story Edwardian brick building on Little Collins Street with a basement and street-level retail spaces. A 1998 refurbishment converted the upper floors into 16 residential units, blending modern living with the building's Edwardian-era character.

Built in 1891, this Little Collins Street building began as a cyclorama before becoming the printing works of Specialty Press. Georges bought it in 1960 to expand its homewares business as the Hostess Store, and a 1995 conversion removed the roof to create the atrium, dividing the interior into apartments, retail and offices.

The Philadelphia stands on the corner of Spring Street and Flinders Lane, opposite the Treasury Gardens. The current residential tower was completed in 2001 to a design by the architecture firm Robert Peck von Hartel Trethowan, built by Multiplex. It reused the frame of an earlier office building on the site, which gained extra floors and a new glazed façade in place of its old brickwork.

108 Flinders is a twelve-storey apartment building completed in 2014, designed by the architecture firm Fender Katsalidis and developed by Riverlee. It was built new on the site of the former Dunlop House, the head office of Pacific Dunlop. When that earlier building was demolished, a bronze bas-relief made by sculptor Pasquale Marinelli in 1968, which had stood on its Flinders Street façade for over forty years, was saved and re-installed in the new building's lobby.

172 William Street began as a secondary-grade office building. In the second half of 1996 it was withdrawn from the office-leasing market and converted into apartments, part of a wave of late-1990s CBD office-to-residential conversions. Today it holds privately owned apartments alongside Quest on William's serviced apartments. It carries no heritage listing.

33M rises at the eastern edge of the CBD, on Mackenzie Street between Exhibition and Russell. The Singapore developer CEL Development bought the site in 2010 and built the tower through the contractor Brookfield Multiplex, to a design by the architecture firm Elenberg Fraser, completing it in 2013. The architects broke the massing into a cluster of white concrete forms above a bronze-glass podium. It holds apartments over ground-floor retail, with rooftop gardens and a pool.

A former warehouse and store on the south side of Flinders Lane, at the corner of Market Street, in the precinct that grew up around Queens Wharf as the heart of 19th-century Melbourne's wholesale trade. E. E. Miller owned the site for some sixty years from the late 1880s. Tenants came and went — manufacturing chemists, the Boy Scouts' Association of Victoria, an electrical firm — until a 1998 refurbishment turned the building over to apartments above ground-floor retail.

A three-storey store and warehouse built in 1887 for the hardware and ironmongery merchant Thomas Warburton Pty Ltd, designed by the architecture firm Twentyman & Askew and built by William Radden. Its Little Bourke Street front is rendered brick; the Warburton Lane side keeps its original polychrome brickwork. One of a group of Warburton buildings raised here across the late nineteenth century, it was refurbished and subdivided around 2000 and now holds six apartments above a shop.

419 Lonsdale Street is a small apartment building at the western end of Lonsdale Street, near Hardware Lane in the Melbourne CBD. It holds eight residences, the largest a dual-level penthouse set over two floors. The ground beneath has been documented as occupied since 1866, when an early building stood here, possibly an outbuilding of the nearby Crown Hotel. That layer is recorded on the state's archaeological inventory and kept protected beneath the present building.

Arizona stands on Anthony Street, the short lane that runs between Flinders Lane and Flinders Street, a few steps west of Hosier Lane. Built in 1995, it holds six apartments. The lane sits at the southern edge of the grid, in the band of narrow streets and former warehouses that grew up around Flinders Lane's old rag trade.

Australis is a glass residential tower at the north-west edge of the CBD, a short walk from Flagstaff Gardens. The Melbourne developer Central Equity built it as the seventy-seventh in its long run of city apartment projects, with the architecture firm Doig Architecture on design and the builder Multiplex on construction. It was completed in 2016 and holds 552 apartments across one, two and three-bedroom layouts, with several penthouses at the top.

Bourke Mews began as a row of four three-storey shop-residences — shops at street level, rooms above — designed by Edward G Kilburn in the Italian Renaissance Revival style and built by T J Taylor. Later subdivision turned the row into eight apartments. It sits within the Bourke Hill precinct, the only main street in the CBD to keep the character and scale of the pre-land-boom city.

Cavendish House was built in 1927 as a warehouse for the wholesale firm Debenham's, designed by the architecture firm A & K Henderson and built by Watts and Sons. Unusually for the day, it was built of brick rather than concrete, with hollow-block floors for fire resistance. During the Second World War the Australian Red Cross packed prisoner-of-war parcels here. It was converted to apartments in 1994, with two floors added.

City Gate Tower is an eighteen-storey residential building on La Trobe Street, purpose-built as apartments and completed in 1997. It stands at the edge of the old "Little Lon" district. Set into its alcove is a plaque marking the women's Providence — a relief centre and night school for unemployed servant girls — that Mary MacKillop's Sisters of St Joseph ran nearby in the 1890s. The tower itself carries no heritage listing.

Built in 1908 by F.E. Shillabeer for the St James Church of England trustees, this three-storey office building took the steamship firm Huddart, Parker & Co. as its first tenant, with the Orbost Shipping Co. above. Its symmetrical façade is unusual for the city, drawing on Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts sources — fluted pilasters and a parapet of foliage and tendril detail. The façade survives today as the heritage base of the Collins House tower.

On the corner of Franklin and Stewart Streets, this three-storey brick warehouse went up in the 1870s for the tinware manufacturer Alfred Shaw and Co. It began as a tin-stamping and japanning works. The stuccoed Renaissance Revival front, rusticated at street level, later carried the name of a second firm, Currie and Richards, whose hardware business gives the building its name today. The upper floors are now apartments.

Equus is one of four sections of the Melbourne Terrace Apartments, built on the Franklin and Queen Street corner in 1994 to a design by Nonda Katsalidis. It was purpose-built as homes — among the first apartment blocks to go up in the city centre — when Melbourne was trying to draw residents back into the CBD. Each of the four entries carries a copper sculpture; the Equus entry shows a centaur, half man and half horse.

On the corner of Collins and Queen Streets stands the former head office of the Bank of Australasia. The architecture firm Reed & Barnes built the original two-storey bank in 1876, its façade cut from Oamaru stone shipped over from New Zealand. In 1929–31 the firm A & K Henderson raised it to a five-storey frontage and rebuilt the interior around a domed banking chamber. The bank occupied it until 1974; today it holds apartments, known as Treasury on Collins.

This was the headquarters of the Victoria Police, built in stages between 1940 and 1943 to a design by Percy Everett, chief architect of the Victorian Public Works Department, and built by Dawson and Smith. A stepped brick-faced tower topped by a radio mast, it was one of the tallest buildings in Melbourne when it opened. The police moved out in 1995, and it was later converted to apartments.

Grand Central Apartments occupy the former headquarters of the Victorian Railways, built along Spencer Street in the early 1890s and, at the time, the largest office building in the colony. It was designed by the railways' own engineering office and built by the contractor James Moore. After the railways moved out, it became apartments and a hotel in 1997.

Henty House was built in 1924 to a design by the architecture firm W & R Butler, for the merchant firm James Henty & Co, on a site St James' church had occupied until 1914. It went up as offices, with Henty & Co on the whole ground floor and the upper floors let to tenants. The Federal Government took it over in 1947 for the Civil Aviation Department. It was converted to apartments in 1996.

Little Hero rises eight storeys from a narrow CBD laneway, with shops, cafes and restaurants on the ground floor and apartments above. The architecture firm Fender Katsalidis designed it for developer Delphine Holdings, and the builder Hickory assembled it from prefabricated modules made off-site, craning the structure into place in about twenty working days. Completed in 2010, it holds 63 one- and two-bedroom apartments and duplex penthouses.

Masonic Club Building was designed by Joseph Plottel, who won a 1925 competition to design it, and finished in 1927. It held the Masonic Club's rooms on its upper floors, above shops and offices below, and was turned into apartments — now the Cosmopolitan — in the 1990s.

Two four-storey brick warehouses went up on Collins Street in 1884. In 1912 the building's owners, the Fourth Victoria Permanent Property Building and Investment Society, had the architect Robert Haddon raise it to six storeys and reface it: a plain white-rendered front with whimsical decorative touches, one of Melbourne's earliest buildings to look to modern European design. It was later converted to apartments.

Morgan Place, at 547 Flinders Lane, was built in 2000 — apartments above a single ground-floor shop, eight levels in all. It went up as new housing rather than a conversion of an older building, so there is no older shell behind the façade. People were living here by 2001, and it remains apartments today.

The Mutual Store was Melbourne's first department store, run by a company set up in 1872 in which the staff shared the profits alongside the shareholders. After a fire destroyed the original store on New Year's Day 1891, the architecture firm Reed, Smart & Tappin designed the present building, rebuilt the same year. The Council of Adult Education occupied it for almost forty years before it was converted to apartments in 2006.

For most of the twentieth century 82 Flinders Street was the Phoenix Hotel, a pub that drew journalists from the neighbouring Herald & Weekly Times and was for a time owned by the Collingwood footballer turned columnist Lou Richards. The hotel was demolished, and in 2013-14 a residential tower designed by the architecture firm Fender Katsalidis went up on the narrow site: a so-called pencil tower, very slender, holding 28 apartments, one to a floor.

Republic Tower stands on the corner of Queen and La Trobe Streets, a 36-storey apartment tower rising from a five-storey mixed-use podium. It was designed by the architecture firm Nation Fender Katsalidis, with Nonda Katsalidis as design director, and built at the close of the 1990s. Its bow-shaped forms in off-form concrete, glass and stainless steel made it one of Melbourne's first high-rise residential towers for city living. A curved wall on the corner carries changing public artworks.

Rocke Tompsitt was built as a warehouse and offices for Rocke, Tompsitt & Co., a firm of wholesale druggists and chemists. The architecture firm F. M. White and Son designed it, and it opened in 1909: six storeys including a basement, in rendered brick over a base of polished Harcourt granite and rock-faced bluestone. It was refurbished in 1986 and converted into apartments in 2000.

Temple Court was built in 1924–25 to a design by the architecture firm Grainger, Little, Barlow & Hawkins, replacing an earlier building of the same name that had been the first home of the Victorian bar. Built as offices, it was unusual for its day: the businesses inside owned their offices rather than renting. It was converted to apartments in 2001.

Now known as Victoria Hall, this building on the corner of Russell and Victoria Streets was originally the hall of the Independent Order of Oddfellows, a friendly society that ran sick pay, medical care and funeral benefits for its members in the days before government welfare. It was built in the Italian Renaissance style as a two-storey rendered-brick lodge. In 2001 it was refurbished and converted to apartments, with a top storey added.