Nothing says “warehouse living” quite like discovering your future home also functions as a StairMaster you can’t cancel the membership to. Welcome to the top floor — sorry, “Level 3, no lift” — of the old Foy and Gibson complex on Oxford Street, Collingwood, where the listing photos promise soaring ceilings and heritage romance, and the floor plan promises you’ll need a Ventolin puffer and possibly a sherpa just to get the mail.
The catwalk
Let’s talk about the catwalk, because it’s the star of the show and it knows it. Somebody looked at a perfectly normal mezzanine bedroom, looked at the balcony twenty-odd feet away across an open two-storey void, and decided the correct engineering response was a steel-grate footbridge straight out of an Indiana Jones set piece. One misjudged 2am stumble in socks and you’re not going to the toilet, you’re auditioning for a stunt double. Genuinely inspired. Genuinely unhinged. We would not remove it for anything.
A short, unrequested history lesson
The building itself has more history than most of Collingwood’s newer warehouse conversions can be bothered mentioning. Foy and Gibson was once one of the largest employers in the colony — an entire vertically integrated department-store empire, making and selling everything from hats to furniture under one very large, very red-brick roof, back when Collingwood was a manufacturing suburb and not a postcode people brag about at dinner parties. A century and change later, its bones have been sliced into apartments for people who will pay handsomely for the privilege of a mystery draught whistling in through the original pipe gaps in the wall. Artisanal air conditioning, we’re calling it. Character, apparently, comes standard with the possum access.
To be fair, and we try to be, occasionally
The bones here really are gorgeous. Vaulted timber ceilings, exposed steel trusses, a wall of sawtooth skylight glass pumping in northern light like the place is auditioning for an architecture magazine. The main living space is a genuine 8.8 by 9.8 metre cavern of a room, the kitchen is sleek stainless steel, and whoever staged it with the Wassily chairs and that alarmingly confident red fridge enclosure deserves a raise. It photographs like a Berlin gallery. It lives, we suspect, like a fire drill with excellent lighting.
The location, begrudgingly conceded
And yes, the location is genuinely unbeatable — Smith Street, Brunswick Street and the Yarra parklands all a lazy stroll away, assuming your knees have anything left to give after the stair climb. There’s hydronic heating for winter, a rooftop terrace with eastern views for the two days a year Melbourne cooperates with sunshine, and a basement car space, so at least your car doesn’t have to do the stairs too.
Who this is actually for
Someone young, fit, mildly reckless, deeply committed to the warehouse aesthetic, and completely at peace with the idea that “nipping down for milk” is now a cardio session with a side of structural vertigo. Someone who has watched a grown adult in a suit try to cross that catwalk holding a laundry basket and thought: yes, that’s my house now.
It’s beautiful. It’s borderline insane. It’s very Collingwood. Bring your inhaler, bring your balance, and leave the fear of heights at reception — there isn’t one, you’ll have already walked past it three flights ago.
