Captain Melville

Built in 1853 as Mac's Hotel, the bluestone building on Franklin Street holds the oldest continuously licensed hotel site in Melbourne's CBD, and has traded under different names and guises across more than seventeen decades. Since 2012 it has operated as Captain Melville, a reworking led by Breathe Architects in consultation with the National Trust that stripped back later additions to expose the original stone and timber, then filled the rooms with a public bar, courtyard dining and function spaces upstairs. The kitchen sources from Victorian farms and sticks to shared plates, steaks and pub standards rather than reinventing the format, while fourteen taps of Australian craft beer do much of the work at the bar. It's independently owned, unusual for a venue of this size in the CBD, and open seven days from midday. For a sense of what colonial Melbourne's hotels looked like before most were pulled down or renovated past recognition, this is one of the last examples standing.