Curtin House is a six-storey Commercial Palazzo style building on Swanston Street in the Melbourne city centre, built in 1922 for the Tattersalls Club with offices to rent, and transformed in the early 2000s into a 'vertical laneway', with a range of specialist retailing, dining, and entertainment spaces occupying every floor and the roof.
[10] In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the building housed the offices of the Victorian Branch of the Communist Party and its youth wing the League of Young Democrats.
As supporters of Stalin, who had made a pact with Hitler, the CPA Australia was anti-war, and so seen as unpatriotic, and their offices and library here were famously raided on 17 June 1940 minutes after the Federal Cabinet decided to ban the party, 'seizing enough literature to fill two vans'.
Through the 1980s and 90s, Curtin House was occupied by a range of business and organisations attracted by the cheap rent, such as the Genealogical Society,[14] and eventually used for pop up exhibitions and not quite legal residential space.
In 2003, the first to open was the bar-cum restaurant Cookie, occupying the high-ceilinged former club room on the first floor, developed by Camillo and Monika Ippoliti.
The design by Phillip Schemnitz retained the main surviving features and combined them with careful interventions, and won a Hall of Fame gong in the 2018 Eat Drink awards.