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The Waterside Hotel is almost ready to reopen after a five-year rebuild that gutted the historic pub and added four stories of rooftop terraces and hanging gardens.
The facade is all that remains of the original pub at the corner of King and Flinders streets, which was once dubbed “the dirtiest in Melbourne”.
Chef Sarah Chan and Sand Hill Road group co-founder Matt Mullins at the Waterside Hotel, where a revamp is nearing completion. Credit: Joe Armao
The rebuild has created a seven-storey venue that can hold 1000 people. It has a ground-floor public bar and beer garden serving parmas and pies, and a three-level South-East Asian dining restaurant, Past Port, with tom yum prawn dumplings, crispy fried bebek (Balinese duck) with sambals and spanner crab pad Thai on the menu.
The Sand Hill Road group, a seasoned pub developer and operator, bought the pub in 2017 and brought in Technē Architecture to transform the building.
“You enter into the beer garden and then six storeys of pub sort of rise up above you,” Sand Hill Road co-founder Matt Mullins says, while leading a tour of the venue. “Each level of the hotel has a terrace or balcony which wraps the whole way around the void.”
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The rebuild was estimated to cost $27 million two years ago, but soaring construction costs have required what Mullins calls “a massive investment”.
Central to the pub’s redesign are 1825 plants, which are being used to create what Lord Mayor Nick Reece described as a “Hanging Garden of Babylon” or “hanging garden of Flinders Street” when the venue came before the City of Melbourne for planning approval.
Mullins says: “When we first conceived this building, we had imagined these stacked layers that would enable us to have outdoor spaces at every floor, but we also imagined this lush green environment in the middle of an otherwise very urban CBD setting.”
Sand Hill Road was started by five friends – Mullins and his brother Matt, Andrew Larke, Doug Maskiell and Tom Birch – in 2000 when they first leased Fitzroy’s Commercial Club Hotel.
The group renovated The Espy in St Kilda and sold the property for $64 million in 2022. Sand Hill Road sold the leasehold of The Espy, Garden State Hotel in Flinders Lane, The Posty, Bridge Hotel, Holliava and Richmond Club, all in Richmond, and the Prahran Hotel and Terminus in Abbotsford to hotel group the Australian Venue Co in a deal valued at about $100 million in 2022.
Artists’s renders of the Waterside Hotel redevelopment when it is completed.
The Waterside was the only venue Sand Hill Road retained, and the group has focused all of its energy on the pub’s rebuild.
Mullins says a lot has changed in the 26 years he has been involved in pubs, but the main thing is the focus on food alongside drinks – the Waterside’s food is overseen by chef Sarah Chan, who headed up the Espy’s Mya Tiger restaurant.
“Our first pub barely had a kitchen, and this pub’s got three,” he says. “That is by far the single biggest and most obvious change across those 26 years in pubs, and it’s enormous – it’s completely changed the face of pub life. No doubt about it, every single person who walks into this pub will probably eat something.”
It’s a far cry from when a pub first opened on the site of the Waterside in 1853. In those days, it was a wharf-side pub, before the Yarra was redirected to enable the Flinders Street rail lines to be built.
For many new arrivals to Melbourne, the Waterside was their first port of call. However, it quickly developed a rough reputation and early mentions of the pub in The Age largely refer to burglaries from the rooms of staff and residents.
The pub serviced wharf workers and became one of Melbourne’s “early openers”, serving drinks from 7am.
“It has always been a dodgy strip in Melbourne, at least all of my life,” Mullins says. “To be honest, when you study the history of the European settlement of Melbourne, it’s actually been dodgy from the beginning. The last time the area wasn’t dodgy was in 1834, before Europeans arrived.”
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The Waterside was singled out by Judge Fraser of the Licensing Court in 1952 as “the dirtiest in Melbourne”, as reported by The Age that year.
The pub’s reputation hadn’t improved by 2000, when Age journalist James Button wrote of the area around the Waterside: “If Collins Street has a Paris end, this is the Marseilles end of Flinders Street.”
In 2004, the Waterside was bought by a syndicate including former AFL footballers Nick Riewoldt, Brendon Gale, Wayne Campbell, Stuart Wigney and Nathan Brown, who renovated it and operated it for more than a decade before selling.
Mullins says that despite the bad rap that King Street can get, the area is fast transforming.
“There are now more workers working around us, there are now more people living in apartments around us, there are more hospitality ventures that are popping up around us that will eventually change the character of the entire area,” he says. “We will just do our best to run an extraordinary hospitality venue here like we always do. And as a general rule, every time a good, well-run place opens up in any area, the area should be the better for it.”
The Waterside Hotel is due to reopen in November.
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