St Kilda’s historic Tolarno Hotel, famed for its restaurant murals featuring the artworks of Melbourne icon Mirka Mora, is on the market for the first time in nearly 30 years.
The lucky buyer won’t just get a piece of local folklore with their purchase, but the building’s 35-room hotel and ground floor restaurant made famous by Mora and husband Georges, who entertained the art elite and did much to shape the city’s cultural and culinary life in the 1950s and 1960s, including holding Melbourne’s first restaurant liquor licence.
Tolarno Hotel owners Bernard Corser and James Fagan in front of a historic Mirka Mora mural in the hotel’s restaurant. Credit: Penny Stephens
The Tolarno’s joint owners, property investors James Fagan and Bernard Corser, bought the property in 1995 for $1.01 million after spotting a real estate classified ad in The Age.
“Even then it was a trophy building, it was in the Melways,” said Corser, 71.
The pair admitted it would be a wrench to sell.
“It is [difficult] for me but I have to face reality,” Fagan said. “I’ll be like a lost lamb for a while.”
“We arrived at the answer together,” Corser added.
Mirka Mora at the hotel in 1969.Credit: Fairfax Photographic
When the Moras owned the property in the 1960s and 1970s, the ground floor contained a bar, gallery and restaurant, while the family lived upstairs in a mansion they converted into a family home that contained an artist’s studio and boarding house.
In those early days, the restaurant was a venue for some of Mora’s ebullient Bohemian performances.
“[Son] William Mora told me he got his sex education hiding under the tables because there were multiple performances on a Saturday night,” Fagan, 73, said.
“She cut the tops out of her dress … when you went to pay the bill, there were these big nipples protruding out at you.”
While Mora was an artist in her own right and famous for her doe-eyed cherubs, the Moras were friends with famed modern artist Sidney Nolan, and prominent modern art patrons John and Sunday Reed, who founded an artists’ colony Heide and frequented their city restaurants, which the couple ran before moving to St Kilda and buying the Tolarno.
After the couple sold the hotel, it was owned by several investors before Corser and Fagan’s purchase. The restaurant was later run by chefs Leon Massoni, Iain Hewitson, who left after a dispute with Corser and Fagan, and Guy Grossi, who had learnt to cook at the restaurant in the 1970s when his father worked there.
Bernard Corser and James Fagan in the restaurant Credit: Penny Stephens
When an investigation by The Age in 2016 found pasta restaurant chain Sauced was erecting panels which obscured part of the famous murals, Heritage Victoria stepped in and ordered they be restored.
The 968 square metre property at 42 Fitzroy Street, St Kilda is being sold freehold and includes the Mora artworks as well as 165 paintings comprising the winners of the Tolarno graduate art prize, which adorn the hotel walls. The Mora works range from the 1950s to her last mural in 2007. Mora died in 2018 aged 90.
One of the first winners of the graduate art prize was Vincent Fantauzzo, then a student at RMIT. He has since won the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize twice, the Archibald Packing Room Prize and has an art hotel named in his honour in Brisbane.
The 37-room hotel is leased to the La Vie Hotels group on a 35-year contract while the Bergerac restaurant, run by Lionel Leung, closed in August and is now vacant.
The Tolarno Restaurant and Bar is covered by a heritage order with the Victorian Heritage Registry and heritage overlay.
“We have had it for 30 years, it is time to hand the baton on to someone else,” Patton said.
A Mirka Mora mural at the Tolarno Hotel. Credit: Penny Stephens
“I’ll tell you about Jimmy’s triple heart bypass, but you can’t ask about my prostate,” Corser joked.
The pair did not disclose a desired sale price.
“We are waiting to see what the offers are, because we genuinely don’t know what the trophy might attract,” Corser said.
The sale is being handled by property agents CBRE. Offers of interest close on March 6.
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