Boom style architecture

Additional hype generated from the city's growing reputation as a boom town, including being labelled 'Marvellous Melbourne' by George Augustus Sala in 1885, fuelled one of the largest speculative construction periods seen in the southern hemisphere.

Owners of residential and commercial property, confident that ever increasing prices would exceed their debts, would often engage architects to create exuberant designs in exotic styles that signified extreme wealth, something fashionable during the 1880s.

[2][3] Though a bubble existed elsewhere and ended with the Australian banking crisis of 1893, the term's use is rare elsewhere (Ballarat and Bendigo experienced relatively moderate speculation during the period but due to their own property booms also have some civic buildings with similar attributes).

[7] In the 19th century, there was a significant increase in the construction of civic buildings in urban areas throughout the British Empire supported by the rise of the middle class and its leisure activities accommodated by theatres, shopping arcades, and coffee houses.

[6] These buildings embraced the latest architectural trends incorporating both Gothic and classical elements in an unconventional manner to create visually stunning effects in a design approach, criticised in the Modernist period by such commentators as Freeland, as uneducated eclecticism or frivolousness.

This period marked the prevalence of elaborately decorated Victorian architecture in the city recognised as ‘Marvellous Melbourne”[4][13] The centres of gold mining including Ballarat and Bendigo, and even the now smaller towns such as Clunes, Maryborough, Daylesford and Beechworth also feature such buildings.

By the 1880s international exhibitions in Sydney (1879) and Melbourne (1880-81) had popularised sophisticated new products from manufacturing nations and the introduction of various types of specialty glass, adding a colourful element to the generally subdued tones of boom-style building materials.

Painted and enameled decorative panels, etched ruby glass, and high-quality Victorian leadlights, featuring thick and deeply colored quarries and sparkling roundels, were incorporated into door settings, stairwells, and hallway windows.