[3] The Federal Coffee Palace was by far the largest and grandest product of the late 19th century temperance movement in the southern hemisphere.

[4][5] With seven main floors and two more in the corner tower, it was the most massive of the rash of large tall buildings built in the central city in the 1880s boom.

In June 1885, the local businessmen and politicians James Mirams and James Munro established the Federal Coffee Palace Company, and announced their intention to issue £100,000 of shares to buy the plot on the corner of Collins and King streets, and build a seven-storey temperance hotel to the design of Tappin Gilbert and Dennehy, that would be 'the finest in the city'.

[20] The Australian Women's Weekly featured a 1967 article on socialite Peter Janson who leased the vacant upper levels and converted them into an expansive apartment in 1967 including a bedroom in the dome of the tower with an attic window from which the entire city centre could be viewed and a rooftop courtyard garden.

[21] The Federal was designed in an eclectic style, with an array of Renaissance Revival details and French Second Empire style mansard roofs[11] Ellerker & Kilburn designed the building with multiple setbacks to relieve its great bulk whilst making an impressive visual statement with the lofty corner dome.

The setbacks were punctuated by a mixture of recessed and projected balconies, forming a loggia arcade near the base, and large vertical classical temple-like structures.

The interiors were equally impressive, often attributed to William Pitt featured a huge sunlit, four storey lobby with vaulted roof and grand staircase, and a main hall reached via a long arcade loggia of 14 Ionic columns.

[11] The elaborately detailed interior atrium featured giant order composite columns culminating in a Palladian architecture styled arch flanked by vault archway openings.

[22] Despite the lack of a steel frame, and partly due to tall ceilings, its height to roof was also among the highest in the world for a habitable building in 1888.

Disinterest in preservation of the Federal can be explained in part by its failure to compete as hotel accommodation despite attempts at modernisation and the stark contrast of the patchwork interiors between the modern and remaining Victorian features.

According to historian Robyn Annear elaborate Victorian buildings were “really on the nose” and the Federal's creaky floorboards and lack of ensuites were an "extreme embarrassment" in a city desperate for progress in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Elaborate buildings including the Federal were painted in a negative light at the time as they were constructed speculatively with excessively large amounts of borrowed funds many of which were never paid back.

In particular, the association with James Munro carried with it strong links to the city's total economic collapse and corruption prior to the Australian banking crisis of 1893.

Some elements of the building were carefully removed by Whelan the Wrecker; three of the four female statues by modeller Charles William Scurry were relocated to the then new Chateau Commodore in Lonsdale Street, and when that changed hands over 20 years later, they were donated to the McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery in Langwarrin outside Frankston, Victoria in 1996, and a panel of the cast-iron stair balustrade (with 'FCP' in the pattern) was donated by Myles Whelan to the Museum of Victoria in 1992.