Queenscliff

Twenty-eight covers and four rooms above, in a corner pub that has been trading since 1889 and had been renovated four times, most recently in 2004. The 2004 work was the problem. It had been done to a formula that could have been anywhere, and the building is very specifically somewhere.

We stripped back to what the building actually had — the pressed metal ceiling, the original bar carcass, two windows that had been plasterboarded over — and spent almost nothing on the walls. The linings are limewashed hoop pine ply, which is a cheap material and looks it if the setout is careless, so the setout took longer than the installation. The sea-green glazed tile at the bar is the one expensive surface. It is hand glazed, the glaze pools at the tile edges, and across four metres of bar front no two are the same colour.

The brass is unlacquered, which in Queenscliff means it will be dark within two summers and black within five. The owner asked whether we could seal it. We could have. The building is 200 metres from the heads and everything in the town is weathered by the same air; a bar rail that stays bright is the only thing in the room that would look wrong in ten years.