The Terrace on Punt Road With More History Than the Billboard Lets On

Someone posted a photo online recently of those Victorian terraces near Richmond Station, the ones on Punt Road with the massive billboard plastered across the facade. The question was simple enough: what’s the story, do people actually live there?

The answers that came back were not simple at all.

Turns out the building was, for a long time, a brothel. Legal, licensed, operating. And the comments section filled up pretty quickly with people who had personal connections to the place: former workers, former neighbours, a bloke who wired up the red light above the back entrance as a seventeen-year-old apprentice electrician and clearly never forgot it.

One person who’d worked there wrote about it in a way that was genuinely funny and completely unsentimental. Each room had a colour theme. There was a fine system for infractions: no stockings, no nail polish, leaving nose prints on the mirror above the bed. She and her best friend apparently ran up such a tab in fines that management kept them on because they were profitable either way. She got sprung hanging out the window with a client by the owner driving past, who rang in furious. The tone of all of this was fond and matter-of-fact, the way people talk about a chaotic job they did when they were young and probably needed the money.

I don’t have a strong take on the sex work question beyond: it’s legal in Victoria, adults make choices, the industry has enough genuine problems without adding unnecessary stigma to the list. What struck me more was the texture of the neighbourhood history sitting inside that comment thread.

Richmond in the early 2000s was a different place. Neighbours of the brothel described people knocking on their door at all hours, assuming they’d found the right address. Cheap rent, apparently, as compensation. One person said they just stopped answering the door eventually. That’s a very specific kind of Melbourne experience that’s been largely sanded away by fifteen years of gentrification and property prices that would make your eyes water.

The building looks like it’s been converted to apartments now. Someone linked to listings. They look fine. Probably expensive. The billboard is still there, presumably generating income for whoever owns the building. Someone in the thread reckoned a billboard that size on a busy arterial road would net the owner around twenty grand a year. Another person mentioned getting fifty thousand for a Telstra tower above their shops, which I found more interesting than I probably should have.

There was also a story about the original owner-occupiers, apparently passed down from a Year 11 Legal Studies class in 1990. First owner puts up a billboard, gets taken to court by the other residents, they all lose and have to sell to cover costs, new owners move in and put up billboards too. I have no idea if that’s true. It has the shape of an urban legend. But it also has the shape of how a lot of Melbourne’s inner suburbs actually changed hands over the decades: incrementally, financially, with people on the losing end of a decision they didn’t quite see coming.

The building itself is heritage listed, or partly so. Ornate Victorian terrace, high ceilings, the works. The sort of thing that’s now a selling point in a real estate listing. For most of its life it was just a building people moved through for various reasons, some of which are funnier in retrospect than they probably felt at the time.

Cities accumulate this stuff. Every bland facade on a main road has about six different versions of itself stacked underneath. Most of the time you don’t find out. Someone has to ask the right question on the internet at the right moment, and then someone who actually knows has to be in a generous mood.

I don’t know what the building will be in another twenty years. Probably still apartments. Probably more expensive ones.