How this ‘daggy’ suburb became a rising cultural hotspot (with world-class croissants)

In a series, The Age profiles Victorian suburbs and towns to reveal how they’ve changed over the decades.See all 45 stories.

Artist Pamela Irving was on the hunt for a studio. A building with a floor space large enough for her to spread out while working on her latest commission; a four-panel, 10-by-two-metre Venetian glass mosaic for a home in Melbourne’s bayside.

She needed to be near her patron, but she also needed the space to be cheap – a real estate challenge even in 2006.

She found it in a place she had never heard of before: Patterson Road, Bentleigh.

The compact and slightly daggy 1950s-era shopping strip had a vacant shop at the end of the retail strip that was spacious, had large north-facing windows and a snug courtyard.

But some saw Irving’s new address as an odd fit for the painter, mosaic artist and sculptor who created Larry La Trobe. The bronze sculpture of a nuggety dog wearing a spiked collar and playfully sticking his tongue out stands guard outside the Melbourne Town Hall. Yet here she was setting up a studio not in Brunswick, but Bentleigh.

“People said, ‘Oh, Bentleigh; it’s not very cultural’. But I said, ‘It will grow around me’. And it has.”

Beyond Bentleigh’s borders, Irving is also known for her 12-metre-tall mosaic characters on Luna Palace, the building which houses Luna Park’s dodgem car arena.

But to locals, she is the artist behind Stationary Faces, their beloved 150-square-metre mosaic that brightens the underpass at Patterson Station.

A patchwork of around 500 grinning, glowering and gleeful faces, the 2012 work was made by local school students and kindergarten children, as well as Melbourne schools further afield and international contributions from the Chicago Mosaic School in America.

Artist Pamela Irving in her Bentleigh studio with her trusty dog, Larry La Trobe. Credit: Penny Stephens

“I think if you’re going to have urban sprawl, then you have to have cultural sprawl as well, which is partly why I wanted to do the mosaic wall,” she says.

Another, more practical, reason was to rid the underpass of graffiti. Irving would see walls covered in graffiti in the morning and by the end of the day, it had been painted over. The pattern was repeated so often it got Irving thinking.

“I thought if it was covered in mosaics, then it wouldn’t be tagged,” she says. “And it worked.”

If Patterson Road is Bentleigh’s village, then Centre Road is its town centre.

Long and straight, Centre Road runs east from East Brighton to Springvale. Bentleigh’s commercial heart occupies a retail strip of just over a kilometre in length.

Here, there are ramen and dumpling restaurants, Asian and South African grocers, opp shops galore, nail salons, mobile repair shops, barbers serving beer, cafés by the dozen and, on Sundays, a market selling everything from plants to paintings.

There is a big box chemist and a family-run pharmacy that still makes home deliveries. All three supermarket giants are represented. Seemingly against the odds, there are also butchers, fishmongers and fruit and vegetable grocers – the latter with produce piled perilously high on sloping shelves with mirror splashbacks.

The three-year-old Artisanal Bakehouse, a petite French bakery owned by French bakers David Caillaud and Baptiste Marcais, was named one of the world’s best pastry shops this year when it made the La Liste World Pastry guide. Where this list sits on the scale of reputable rankings of global pastries is unclear – even Marcais is unsure – but the gong was celebrated as a sign that postcode 3204 had gained a certain je ne sais quoi.

French bakers Baptiste Marcais and David Caillaud, co-owners of Artisanal Bakehouse. Credit: Joe Armao

It’s not uncommon for weekend queues to stretch along two shopfronts. Marcais acknowledges, with respect, the dedication with which the faithful line up. An average Saturday can see 620 croissants fly from the glass cabinet in various varieties including almond, plain, pistachio and chocolate.

“We chose Bentleigh because we wanted a busy street without the competition of other bakers,” Caillaud says. “Even though we are confident in what we are doing, we wanted to stand out and be where [there are] a lot of families, schools and apartments.”

Lifetime local Helena Johnson, who has run Helena’s Curiosity Shop in the Centre Arcade for 30 years, has never seen anything like it in Bentleigh.

“They are the current feature of Centre Road. It’s incredible. They have brought people from all over Melbourne to Bentleigh,” she says. “They are the only shop in Centre Road with a queue.”

Helena Johnson’s curiosity shop still draws its fair share of shoppers but she says the queues at the bakery are something else.Credit: Joe Armao

Rosa Zouzoulas grew up in Bentleigh and says the suburb strikes the perfect balance between the space of suburbia – Bentleigh’s ten parks add up to a combined 13.4 hectares of open space – and access to amenities.

Zouzoulas, now Glen Eira Council’s planning and place director, says while Bentleigh’s population is largely made up of couples with children (35 per cent of households) and couples (22 per cent), a quarter of households are lone-person households made up of either young professionals or older residents.

“The retail mix has grown with the community,” she says. “There’s a diverse range of retail shops, and a thriving nighttime economy starting to emerge. You don’t have to go into the city if you want a drink with your friends any more.”

Centre Road is, by the council’s own definition, an activity centre.

The shopping strip could yet catch the Allan government’s eye as an area ripe for rezoning as part of a housing density push, as has already happened in nearby Brighton and Hampton.

Rosa Zouzoulas grew up in Bentleigh and loves the amount of open space in the suburb.Credit: Joe Armao

Half of the 50 neighbourhood activity centres have been named by the government. Bentleigh is not among them. Yet.

“We have some concerns about these announcements,” Zouzoulas says.

“We feel like we have been left out of the picture a lot as a council and there is uncertainty for us and our community about what that growth will look like in the future.”

Centre Road has been an identifiable landmark on the map of what is now Bentleigh but what, after European settlement, was named East Brighton.

A part of the Brighton Estate, the land was divvied up when British-born Henry Dendy, a landowner and speculator, brewer and sheep grazier, used his inheritance to purchase a Special Survey. This gave him the right to select 5120 acres of land as part of a program designed to lure wealthy settlers to Port Phillip.

In 1841, for a pound an acre, the 40-year-old migrant selected land that stretched eastwards from the Brighton foreshore to what is now East Boundary Road, in East Bentleigh.

The Brighton Estate’s northern boundary was evocatively named North Road, the southern boundary captivatingly called South Road. And the centre line on the survey became, well, Centre Road.

The early development of Dendy’s Brighton was concentrated on the seafront, where he built his two-storey mansion. Other well-off settlers constructed homes beside the bay, which had evidence of the regular visits made by the traditional owners, the Ngaruk-Willam clan of the Boon Warrung people. Middens of half-burnt mussel, mutton fish, cockle and periwinkle shells, ashes and animal bones were found in several places along the coastline.

Development further inland, in what is now Bentleigh, was slower. Historian Weston Bate’s account of the area pre-settlement paints a picture of a land covered by trees and tussocks of native grasses. More than 300 native species of flowering plants, including 50 of the 80 orchids then known in Victoria, were found there.

“The natives fitted unobtrusively into the setting much in the manner of the wildflowers though not in such profusion,” he wrote in his 1962 book A History of Brighton. “The numbers were small even at the coming of the first whites.”

However, Bate writes that after first contact, settlement took hold quickly and the land was cleared for sheep and cattle to graze until the early 1850s.

Later the area’s several springs and sandy soil proved perfect for orchards and market gardens, which fed a youthful Melbourne.

Bent by name

East Brighton train station, on Centre Road, opened at the end of 1881 when the line was extended from Caulfield to Mordialloc by railways minister Thomas Bent.

A future Victorian premier and son of a market gardener from nearby Moorabbin, Bent used his position to extend the railway line which spectacularly increased the value of his property developments along the Frankston and Sandringham line rail corridors.

In 1894 The Age published letters revealing the extent of Bent’s corruption; the then railways minister had written to other MPs in 1881, offering railway lines in their electorates in exchange for votes.

A report in The Age on May 9, 1894, quotes correspondence between Thomas Bent and fellow MP Francis Conway Mason.Credit: Fairfax Archives

Never shy of making self-serving decisions in political life, Bent became colloquially referred to as “Bent by name, bent by nature”.

Nonetheless, it is after Bent that Bentleigh was named, with both the suburb and the station changing names during his years as premier.

Boom time in Bentleigh coincided with the baby boom; the post-war era when the market gardens were subdivided into generous-sized blocks for couples and families seeking affordable housing.

Joyce Riggs still lives in the same Bentleigh street she was born in. In her 100 years she has moved house just once; from number eight to number 11.

One of four children, her family had bread and milk delivered by horse and cart, with “the milky” filling the billy her mother had left out.

Her favourite local outing as a child was going late night grocery shopping on Centre Road with her mum or to the cinema near the station.

Others were drawn to the Star Dance Studio, which opened in 1962 in the newly built Centre Arcade. A local landmark, the two-storey building with its distinctive blue and yellow chequered facade and original ‘Star Dance Studio’ neon sign, is one of Glen Eira Council’s buildings of significance.

In its heyday up to 200 people would turn out in their finest for a dance, all of them aged under 25 and most of them in their late teens.

The Centre Arcade’s blue and yellow chequered facade and neon sign dates back to 1959.Credit: Joe Armao

Bruce Stanning started dancing at the studio as a 14-year-old in 1966 before moving on to competitive ballroom dancing and later teaching. He still dances on the air-sprung parquetry dance floor now, aged 72.

Today, Stanning says, dancers are aged over 50 and barely 50 people turn up for social events – half the numbers seen before the pandemic.

Buxton Bentleigh director and auctioneer Simon Pintado says the suburb has always been middle class and – compared with suburbs on the bay side of Nepean Highway – affordable.

“It used to be looked at as the little brother of Brighton or Brighton East but with the bigger blocks and the beach just a couple of minutes away, you get much more bang for your buck.”

The federal division of Goldstein, a bayside seat which stretches from Elsternwick to Beaumaris, takes in both the bay and the Bentleigh sides of the highway.

Teal independent Zoe Daniel won the seat from Tim Wilson in 2022. It was a seismic shift; Goldstein had been held by the Liberals and their predecessors since federation.

With a federal election due early next year, corflutes for both candidates are already being fixed to fences, signs of just how contested the seat will be.

But not everything changes. Both the village and the town centre have retained their niche retailers whose curious expertise have allowed them to become stalwarts. If you’re hunting for sewing lessons, an astrologer to see off evil spirits or require a leather tailor or furniture upholsterer, then look no further than Centre Road.

If you want a particular style button, need a rubber stamp custom-made or a violin repaired your search ends on Patterson Road.

Ukrainian-born violin maker Leon Petroff, who has worked on Patterson Road since the 1990s, has drawn Melbourne Symphony Orchestra musicians to his workshop to have their instruments repaired for years. Sometimes Irving can hear the sounds of a violin playing through their shared brick wall as Petroff works with a violinist to get their instrument just right.

“It’s lovely. Instead of being locked away in a warehouse, I have a shopfront and I can walk down the street and say hello to ten people. It’s a real community,” Irving says.

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