Extensive scaffolding and formwork used to construct the concrete of the Veneto Club. Photograph courtesy of the Veneto Club.
Veneto Club
by Madeline Lo-Booth
The Veneto Club is a venerated institution, though it’s a place many Melbourne people have never heard of. If you’ve been to Heide Museum of Modern Art, it’s likely you’d have driven along the M3 Eastern Freeway and taken the turn off onto Bulleen Road. On this road, the “brutalist” Veneto Club stands as a concrete mass, partly covered by a variety of appendages that enable it to function as a community space, reception centre, sporting club, restaurant, and pokies venue. Recently, things around here seem to be changing almost weekly, with frequent road closures and openings as the state government links the north to the east under the banner of Victoria’s Big Build.
In the past, the Veneto Club was veiled by established native trees on a road that felt more like a boulevard, lined proudly by private school sports fields. That same road is now a ginormous construction site. On a Saturday morning, tradespeople fill the club carpark, and one even whizzes by on an e-scooter, whipping gravel into the air, adding an industrial texture to the incessant drone of the Eastern Freeway. The Veneto complex backs onto bushland on the banks of the Birrarung/Yarra River, and bellminers provide the melody to a soundscape that captures the surprising harmony of clashing elements that make this part of Melbourne distinctive.
I have always known the Veneto Club. Here, as a kid, my soccer team, Box Hill Inter, with its black-and-blue striped kits à la Inter Milan, faced off with our rivals, the Bulleen Lions, who pay tribute to the lion of St Mark, which protrudes from Venice’s main piazza. This famous lion is replicated at the Veneto’s Club grand entrance: a monumental, winged lion penetrating the sky from a plinth at the centre of a circular pool of water. To the north-east, a Venetian gondola pays tribute to the venue’s namesake.
A Venetian gondola near the synthetic soccer pitch. Shading devices and the curved ceiling of the front entrance are later additions, while the brickwork and iconic patterned concrete facing north-east are part of Smrekar’s 1972–1973 design. Photograph by the author.
Ermin Smrekar is the architect behind the Veneto Club (1972–1973). He moved to Melbourne from Italy in the mid-1950s and finished his studies at RMIT. And though he’s not responsible for the gondola, nor the dramatic front entrance, Norman Day has labelled him the “king of kitsch.” Smrekar is also known for Old Melbourne Motor Inn (1979) on Flemington Road (now RMIT Village behind hype Hainanese chicken spot Gai Wong), and Fishermen's Pier Restaurant in Geelong (1971), a timber pavilion resembling a streamlined clam shell on the water’s edge. They’re not his only projects, but a comparison of these three projects gives a sense of the architect’s range, or preparedness to experiment.
Geometric relief patterns and filleted concrete as part of Smrekar’s 1972–1973 design with more recent additions in the foreground. Photograph by the author.
His design for the Veneto Club is a square set on the diagonal, constructed primarily from cast-in-situ concrete with filleted extents and geometric reliefs visible in horizontal bands on most elevations. These bas-reliefs are Le Corbusier-esque, offering the closest glimpse of Chandigarh or Marseille one can find in the extents of Manningham council.
Mezzanine (middle) level floor plan. Drawing courtesy of the Veneto Club.
The original building comprises three floors, with a double-height void at the centre forming a middle mezzanine level with function rooms and offices fanning out around the perimeter. The top floor is a function room with its own kitchen, and the ground floor is home to a restaurant, kitchen, pokies, and an administration area.
Elevations. Drawing courtesy of the Veneto Club.
The building may not announce itself as recognisably “Italian-Australian”, which in Melbourne is largely characterised by postwar brick homes. Elements like the protruding concrete gutters, relief work, filleted geometries, and cantilevers link the Veneto Club to the more expressive branch of Italy’s late modernist architects of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Alberto Galardi and Leonardo Ricci.
Meanwhile, reference to the homeland is also expressed through flags and pixelated photographs of Venice adorning the walls. Near the entrance, a circular concrete elevator shaft with a glass elevator contained within feels glamorous and casino-y, making it easy to picture Bulleen’s ageing population in their heyday. At many points, the interior feels quite PoMo, with decorative mirrored columns adorning the corners, and on the top floor a large piece of marble greets you at the entranceway to a large function room.
Marble feature wall. In the mirror’s reflection, you can see a bronze bust of Pope Pius X. Photograph by the author.
It’s hard not to feel nostalgic about a space which appears to be in the middle of major upheaval, as the surrounding construction signals. To assess how the place has changed over the years, I ask the people of a Facebook group called “We grew up in Bulleen” about their memories of the club. My post clocks 200 likes. People tell me they used to go to Blue Light Discos, met their husbands here, and one person says he used to shoot rabbits on the site before it was built. Known for its visible use of concrete, the building is cherished by the Italian community and beyond.
By all accounts, the Veneto Club appears highly successful at what its forebears sought to do: creating space for a Venetian identity in Australia. The bistro next to the eighteen-plus pokies section is populated by families and single nonnas being waited on by teenagers. A small shop near the front counter has a selection of imported Italian deli and dry goods for cooking at home. At the end of bingo, people bid farewell to each other in Italian. As always, it’s hard to say whether the success of the Club is by virtue of a building existing and a community using it, or thanks to Ermin Smrekar’s design.
A filleted corner of the concrete can be seen from the pokies area on the ground floor. Photograph by the author.
The Veneto Club’s minor online reputation as a “brutalist” building almost seems like a curse. While it’s been posted on Instagram accounts and Facebook pages celebrating this architectural style characterised largely by the use of raw concrete, expression of structure, and embrace of geometric shapes and patterns, there’s more to this building than that. Lovell Chen’s Heritage Assessment Report for the North East Link puts the Veneto Club in context with Victoria’s better recognised brutalist builds like Graeme Gunn’s Plumbers and Gasfitters Union Building (1969–1971) and Kevin Borland and Daryl Jackson’s Harold Holt Swim Centre (1966–1969). Among these projects, however, the report notes that Smrekar’s Veneto Club is “unlikely (to) be rated highly,” and its recent additions and renovations have compromised “the clarity and robustness of its expression.”
The geometric motif set in concrete shown during construction. Photograph courtesy of the Veneto Club.
To see the architectural value of the building, a part of me wants to strip back a lot of noise. Of course, there’s the literal noise of a massive construction project surrounding the building right now, but there are also the elements added over time that distract from the parts that point to other international examples of modernism. There’s a tension between enjoying the “purity” of curved concrete in a static black-and-white archival photograph, and a building bearing the clumsiness of surviving multiple decades in use. For example, the geometric concrete designs and the chain drains hanging from trough-like cantilevered gutters appear foregrounded by an outdoor patio of cream shade sails and brown painted timber when experienced in person. The added outdoor enclosure is a practical, not pretty, addition, but it gives a sense of how this building has been added to over the years to fit community needs.
An outdoor terrace with a colourful children’s playground contrasts with the concrete and trough-like gutter of Smrekar’s 1972–1973 design. Photograph by the author.
These cumulative additions remind me of the culture of self-made home renovations that build up over time in working-class homes. The homes of my aunts and uncles, squeezing in home modifications post-work as owner-builders. These bottom-up architectural renovations are in contrast with singular architectural expressions, the kind we still see in glossy magazines or online spreads, which capture a particular mode or moment in time. It reminds me of the classic Robin Boyd criticism of Australian “featurism” and the hodgepodge of differing time periods. Is this not just a working-class approach, of small changes building up to a final product? Of waiting, gradually adding as money rolls in, rather than the ability to put money on the table for a project in full, from the start.
This mix of additions, creating a distinctive mix of high and low-brow references, is precisely the joy of this building as it exists today. It feels utilised, alive, pragmatic, and adaptive. Ultimately though, what makes the Veneto Club compelling to me is how it simultaneously prompts me to imagine numerous overseas references while also asserting itself as an iconic part of Bulleen.
Madeline Lo-Booth is a writer from Naarm/Melbourne.
