
Nicholas Building
Art Deco office tower with a terracotta facade, leadlight arcade, and studios once home to bohemian artists.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Nicholas Building in Melbourne follows Vali Myers, a nineteen-year-old who left the city for Paris in 1949 and became one of the most photographed faces of the Left Bank, tattooing a young Patti Smith years later in Italy. It traces how illness brought her back to Melbourne in 1993 to a seventh-floor studio in this Art Deco tower, built decades earlier on a fortune made selling a homemade aspirin substitute. Look up in the arcade for the barrel-vaulted leadlight ceiling she and everyone else once passed beneath.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Cathedral Arcade
Leadlight-glass arcade from the nineteen-twenties, its stained dome crowning the elbow of an L-shaped shopping lane.
Abbotsford Convent
Riverside heritage precinct of nineteenth-century convent buildings turned artists' studios, galleries and gardens.
Royal Arcade
Nineteenth-century glass-roofed shopping arcade guarded by carved giant figures that strike an hourly clock chime.
The Block Arcade
Ornate Victorian shopping arcade with mosaic-tiled floors and a wrought-iron and glass canopy.
Forum Melbourne
Atmospheric nineteen-twenties picture palace with a starlit painted-sky ceiling and Moorish turrets.
Regent Theatre
Ornate nineteen-twenties picture palace, gutted by fire in nineteen forty-five and twice restored to its gilded splendor.