It was supposed to open in April. Then it was mid-2026. Now, as June arrives, Else Bathhouse is still listing itself as “coming soon” on Bank Street, and a dispute with Heritage Victoria appears to be the reason why.
The project had generated serious momentum. Since its announcement late last year, else Bathhouse had attracted coverage from Time Out, Concrete Playground, Boss Hunting and Australian Traveller, all drawn to the concept: a three-level thermal bathing experience tucked inside a century-old former wool trader and Croft’s grocery store on Bank Street, complete with mineral pools, cold plunges, saunas, a steam and mud room, an alpine cabin and a rooftop “Sky Bathing” terrace with open-air pools overlooking the Melbourne skyline. Founder Paul Absalom had framed the whole thing in elemental, almost philosophical terms. “Else is about presence,” he told media. “It’s about slowing down and stepping away from the noise of everyday life.”
It is, by most accounts, exactly the kind of business South Melbourne needs. It is also, it turns out, exactly the kind of project that Victorian heritage law is capable of tying in knots.
What the Dispute Is Actually About
This is where the story gets genuinely interesting, and genuinely frustrating. According to a Herald Sun report, Heritage Victoria has raised permit concerns over the development despite the Bank Street building not being individually heritage-listed on the Victorian Heritage Register.
So how does Heritage Victoria have standing? The answer lies in the Emerald Hill Estate precinct listing, which covers a significant portion of Bank, Clarendon, Cecil, Park and surrounding streets in South Melbourne. The precinct as a whole is on the Victorian Heritage Register, recognised as an architecturally important example of municipal planning from the 1880s boom. Buildings within its extent, even those not individually listed, can still trigger Heritage Victoria’s jurisdiction depending on the nature of proposed works and their potential impact on the character and cohesion of the precinct.
In else’s case, the proposed rooftop pools and sky bathing element are the most likely flashpoint. Adding water infrastructure and visible structures to the top of a building in a registered heritage precinct is exactly the kind of intervention that invites Heritage Victoria scrutiny, regardless of whether the individual building carries its own listing. The precinct’s significance lies precisely in the visual coherence of its 1880s streetscapes. Anything that breaks that skyline profile from within the precinct boundary is fair game for a permit requirement and, potentially, objection.
A Building That Is Part of the Story
The irony is pointed. The else Bathhouse team has leaned heavily into the building’s heritage character as a selling point. Early promotional material celebrated the exposed brick, original early 1900s murals, timber beams, wool bale pulleys and vintage lift shaft that the fitout preserves. The intention, as described by the project’s architects and designers, was to make the building itself part of the ritual, a living connection to South Melbourne’s commercial past. That’s not a developer looking to erase history. That’s a developer investing in it.
Which makes the regulatory friction harder to accept for those watching from the outside. This is not a case of heritage-blind commercial development bulldozing its way into a sensitive precinct. It is an adaptive reuse project, precisely the type of intervention that heritage policy is supposed to encourage, caught up in what appears to be a permit dispute over elements that sit above the existing roofline.
South Melbourne Is Watching
The local appetite for this project is real. South Melbourne’s wellness credentials have grown steadily in recent years, and the Emerald Hill precinct in particular has the kind of historic texture that makes a bathhouse feel like a natural fit rather than an intrusion. Soak Bathhouse has also announced a South Melbourne location on Clarendon Street for later this year, so the market is clearly there. But else’s Bank Street site, with its bluestone laneway adjacency, its century-old bones and its rooftop city views, has the potential to be something more singular.
The Emerald Hill precinct’s heritage listing exists for good reasons. The intact run of 1880s commercial and residential buildings along Bank Street is, as Heritage Victoria’s own register acknowledges, unique in Victoria. Protecting that cohesion matters. But protection and paralysis are different things, and there is a reasonable case that a well-designed rooftop installation on a non-individually-listed building within the precinct does not materially harm what makes Emerald Hill worth protecting in the first place.
The permit process exists to make that determination. It should make it promptly.
Where Things Stand
Else Bathhouse’s own website now lists its South Melbourne opening as “mid 2026”, a quiet shift from the April date promoted earlier in the year. No revised opening date has been announced publicly. The project has not been cancelled, and the works underway on the building are visible enough to confirm this is not a project in retreat.
South Melbourne has waited before. The South Melbourne Town Hall spent years closed for structural repairs. Patience is not a new requirement in this suburb. But there is a difference between complexity and bureaucratic delay, and right now it is not entirely clear which one we are dealing with.
A bathhouse built to slow things down has, for the moment, been slowed down itself. The least the permit process owes it is a timely resolution.
