WANNA COOKIE?

Melbourne’s iconic Curtin House is a vertical version of the city’s labyrinthine laneways. Its throbbing heart is Cookie, a restaurant, beer hall, meeting place like no other, and just one of this extraordinary building’s myriad marvellous secrets.

(Longform post: 10 minutes read time. Main photo,top: original denim from Petshop Girls)

Photographs: Monty Coles. Words: Janice Breen Burns

 

At first, Curtin House is just a disconcerting doorway. Three times I miss it. Forth and back and forth I walk, looking, looking, frustrated, more frustrated, not realising an incongruous hole on the seedy side of Melbourne’s main CBD artery, Swanston Street, is the building recently described to me as, “like this weird wonderland”. As in, Alice’s.

That first time, I expect something…grander. Curtin’s incongruous opening is anything but; a cutout, plastered with signs that tell a stranger not much, like, that this building really is a rabbit hole, but vertical. You’re meant to “Climb Me”; up up up into its clean, grungy, graffittied stairwell; not down, like Alice. So I put in the puff, and am richly rewarded, like Alice, with revelations on every level.

Slog one flight up around Curtin’s clanking metal lift shaft, circa 1922, and there’s Cookie; high and bright, airy and noisy, oddly familiar and suddenly, just THERE, like a huge, restauranty heaven behind a dark door off the hollow well.
On a Richter scale of Melbourne-ness, Cookie clocks a cool 10. It’s been a Melbourne institution for 10 years: authentic homestyle Thai food, cooked by real (hosted here especially) Thai chefs, picked by diners from nostalgic “Little Golden Book” (remember those?) menus, served on whimsical patterned melamine plates and gingham cloths in a mad, majestic shamozzle of art nouveau architecture.

In fact, the mad, majestic architectural shamozzle that is Curtin House, once the Tattersalls building, a one-time gambling den and former Communist Party Headquarters, Greek school, artist colony and derelict near-write-off, is down to local architect Phillip Schemmitz, obviously a man of quiet reflection, controlled ego and aesthetic restraint. Curtin would look very different were he not.

Mr. Schemmitz was hired by a small consortium – widely regarded as hare-brained at the time – headed by one Tim Peach, who bought the Curtin wreck in 2000. Their vision, to work with the building’s beautiful heart and bones instead of gutting it like an abortion, stuffing it with souless city apartments, and selling them off for a lush profit, was radical for the time.

Mr. Peach still lives the uber-cool life, in deep privacy with his family on level 5 of Curtin’s grungy wonder-land.  His partner, Sally Fethers runs their Metropolis Bookshop on level 3, an extraordinary lose-yourself-for-weeks collection of cutting edge and carefully culled classic and contemporary literature on art, graphic design, popular culture, photography, food and fashion. Testament to Ms. Fethers’ artful edit, is the continuous dribble of academics, designers, artists, students and sundry creatives up and down Curtin’s winding stairs. There aren’t many bookstores in the world as magnetic.

 

Back on Level 1, Cookie is owned by Camillo Ippoliti, a boyish, off-beat former barman, youth worker and world traveller who fell into the business of clubs and bars by accident, but made such a decent fist of it, he’s become a bit of an icon in his own right. As well as Cookie, and the Curtin’s The Toff in Town nightclub (The Toff) on level 2, he started – and yes, let’s dust off that hackneyed superlative again because it just works so damned perfectly here – the ICONIC Revolver nightclub and art venue.

Revolver’s architecture is as glorious and grungy and nonchalently preserved as Curtin’s, implying a definite theme-stream flowing between one Ippoliti venture and the next. (He recently added another nightclub, Bony’s, and an Irish pub conversion to his repertoire.) Revolver is also a home-from-home hangout for artists; Banksy, for example, who left significant souveniers of his work on the walls, and has cranked out sophisticated 20-somethings and sundry wannabes into the early hours of Chapel Street, South Yarra, since 1997.

Mr. Ippoliti’s vision for Cookie, beginning around 2003, naturally required the help of a visionary as laid-back, and mildly madhatterish, as he. “My accountant said at the time, “You’re crazy. You want to do Asian food? On the sleazy end of Swanston Street? Upstairs?”” He mimics a flummoxed accountant, all rolling eyes and upturned palms. “But, I knew we could entice people in, and up. We could create our own identity. I had my ideas about the space, it’s a good space. I’ve always been interested in art and art communities; I just knew (my ideas) would work. We could make something that would make people feel good.”

He hired Karen Batson, a remarkable woman who describes herself simply as “just a cook”, but proved to be the ground-up visionary Cookie needed to earn its iconic stripes over the last decade. She worked with Messrs. Ippoliti and Schemmitz to create a space that, still today, plugs into the psyche, lifts the spirits and provides the kind of snuggle-down comfort most of us only associate with childhood. “It starts with this idea of a secret place,” Ms. Batson says. “People walk past the door and miss it but, once you find it, once you’re here, it’s like your own loungeroom. You can pick up a book and read, have a coffee or a beer, share a combination of dishes with friends, listen to music..there are so many layers.”

So many layers that Cookie, and its upstairs club sister The Toff, are renowned for their appeal to all demographics. On any average day or night, clusters and contented loners dine or chill side by side: students, professionals, academics, artists, politicians, tradesmen, families. Ms. Batson offers them a list of 350 beers, 500 wines, 90 Thai dishes prepared by chefs she scouts in Thailand, plus the usual bar cocktails and coffee options.

“It’s about food, good food, being really accessible and affordable and enjoyable.” It’s also about art – it’s all around – and a spirit-lifting mix of nostalgic debris, often rejigged from the crumbling Curtin interiors: parquetry room dividers (the old floors), a padded vinyl diamond wall, sliding piles of old National Geographics.

Upstairs on level 2, The Toff is a jumping all-night live music venue and bar with an odd-ball offering of train-style carriage booths that, until cameras were installed, diners occasionally used in private liaisons that didn’t always prioritise the food. “Um. Yes. Well, I did have to rip people apart,” Ms. Batson recalls with a hoot of laughter. “We remind them now; “You do realise there are security cameras behind every closed door…?”

The Curtin rabbit hole does ascend and ascend, on past Cookie and The Toff. At level three, if you did not rise by the clanking but surprisingly smooth elevator, but by the left-up, left-up spiral stairs, you collapse onto a landing (well, ok, I did) with a choice of four intriguing doors. One is Metropolis. One is the crisply elegant Someday owned by globallly renowned Melbourne cult brand P.A.M. (Perks and Mini). Its cool curation of clothing, accessories, books and bits (“…one off, unique, vintage, and/or very hard to come by….”) is visited regularly by every artful local and switched on hipster worth his Persols.

Behind the third door is the calm, sunshine-bright headquarters of the masterly simple, intuitive clothing brand Bul. The fourth door is portal to Petshop Girls, a boutique specialising in Japanese mainstream fashion brands, with a smattering of pod collections by gifted young locals. Petshop owner, Chiara Ippoliti, is the daughter of Camillo downstairs. She’s RMIT alumni, but surprisingly, not of the fashion school, but international politics. “Yeah, I could have gone to the UN (United Nations),” she says cheerfully, “But went into fashion instead: nice clothes, nice people, twice a year to Japan.” Somehow, the statuesque Miss Ippoliti’s life choices fit snug into Curtin’s sub-culture of the unexpected.

A funky family owned Kung Fu school, the Wing Chun Bing Fa is highlight on Curtin’s fourth floor but, after Mr. Peach’s private fifth, the rabbit house appears to end at its sixth where a swank-ish new-ish Mexican restaurant Mesa Verde is, miraculously, luring customers a breathless five floors further off the street than even Cookie.

But, of course, you know it doesn’t end there. On Curtin’s rooftop, a combined art space, bar and open-air (summertime only) movie theatre co-exist in name, The Rooftop Bar and Cinema and a lofty sky-scape of steeples, scrapers, Melbourne clouds and black and blueness.

Alice, I suspect, would be more than delighted with the preposterously cool crowd that surrounds us up there. And, Drink Me? Don’t mind if I do.