Melbourne’s Pentridge Prison: stay at the jail turned luxury hotel The Interlude

The transformation of one of Australia’s worst prisons — once home to Ned Kelly and Chopper Read — into a luxury hotel of transcendent serenity is a spectacular feat. The pool alone is criminally good.

The Interlude at the former Pentridge Prison in Melbourne.

The background music at Melbourne’s newest hotel, The Interlude, is suitably unintrusive. Even if it weren’t, you’d never hear tracks like Way Too Pretty for Prison or Back on the Chain Gang.

This 1850s former house of detention doesn’t need jailhouse rock to remind its guests of an extraordinary past that includes Ned Kelly, Chopper Read, escapes, riots and the like.

The Interlude’s classic bluestone building was previously B Division of the infamous HM Prison Pentridgeand has been inventively reborn as a 19-suite “experiential resort”.

Criminal Ronald Ryan arrested after his escape from Pentridge prison. He murdered a warden during the escape and was the last man executed at Pentridge in 1967.

A photograph of Ned Kelly that was circulated after the police murders at Stringybark Creek. It was taken at Pentridge Prison just before his release in February 1874. Public Record Office Of Victoria

I start my exploration of The Interlude at its Underground Relaxation Pool, which is not so much a pool as a transcendent experience. It took three months of hard labour – non-penal, no lashes applied – to excavate 250 tonnes of olivine basalt for the pool space.

You drift, time suspended, in a candlelit blue grotto, looking up through a transparent ceiling to a soaring atrium and skylight.

The ironically named Interlude occupies only a fraction of the 172-year-old Pentridge site in Coburg, north Melbourne. Six-metre stone walls still enclose much of the 33ha complex, stretching almost 7km. If those walls could talk … it’s probably best they don’t.

Prison cells turned into luxury hotel rooms.

The task falls instead to The Interlude’s assistant manager Dylan Bedford as he introduces a session called Story of Place.

It happens in the B Division exercise yard, where the footings of a bizarre, 360-degree surveillance cage known as the Panopticon are still visible.

Following 23 hours in solitary confinement, inmates were released for an hour’s “airing”, where they each paced, hooded and separated, within the Panopticon’s narrow quadrant cages. The bitter refrain from an old Irish prison ballad comes to mind, “And the auld triangle went jingle-bloody-jangle”.

Reformed criminal Mark Chopper Read poses for photo behind bars during a visit to Pentridge Prison in Melbourne in 2002, where he was once an inmate. He died in 2013.

In contrast, we’ve gathered beside a warming fire, sampling wines and snacks as Dylan recounts more prison lore. Ned Kelly’s brief adult life, for instance, was bookended at Pentridge. At 18, he was first incarcerated here for “feloniously receiving a stolen horse”. In 1880, at just 25, the executed bushranger’s body was returned here for burial. Not, it is stressed, in B Division grounds.

The D Division block at Pentridge Prison. Picture: Tim Carrafa

The Interlude is about life today. We head indoors to the unique Olivine wine bar, where the original cell walls have been cut through to form a row of intimate snugs. Mauritian-born sommelier Liinaa Berry opens her tasting session, Time Travel with Wine. The house cellar, we learn, has 525 labels.

.Sommelier Liinaa Berry examining some the extensive wine collection at The Interlude.

Berry channels her enthusiasm into an hour of eclectic tastings across wines ranging from pinot grigio to syrah, from Roussillon in France to Argentina. The session culminates in a surprise pairing of Koko Black chocolate truffles with a mistelle fortified grape juice from Ballarat.

The Interlude’s most spectacular achievement has been its civilising of colonial-era isolation cells into imaginative suites that you’re happy to do time in rather than tunnel out from. They were created by linking four in-line cells, each of about 3m by 2m.

Olivine bar at The Interlude.

The bedroom and bathroom sit at opposite ends, with two living-area cells in between. A premium option, the Sanctuary Interlude Suite, has a fifth cell that accommodates an oversized bath.

B Division closed in 1997, but its iron-clad doors still have inspection holes and meal slots, now sealed. I raid my in-room rations of crafted chocolate delights, Impala & Peacock premium teas and consider the generous minibar. An oversized safety box begs the question: who is going to break into Pentridge?

Bright fabrics and local art soften the stone walls. There’s a smart TV, queen bed and lighting that doesn’t require a PhD to operate.

A narrow skylight sits well out of reach near the vaulted ceiling. Through it, an inmate could glimpse, in Oscar Wilde’s phrase, “that little tent of blue we prisoners called the sky”.

The Interlude’s accommodation packages include experiences such as Story of Place, and a fun, interactive tea blending called Blends with Benefits. Meanwhile, guests are urged to break out, so to speak, and explore the surrounding district.

A bathroom at the Interlude.

I join a surprising Coburg Makers and Creators tour, sampling a shortened version of the usual itinerary. We kick off with an aromatic, behind-the-scenes visit to the family-run Genovese Coffee complex, where every aspect of coffee production and distribution, other than growing it, occurs. The museum-grade collection of vintage Italian espresso machines is astounding.

We go onwards to Cut Throat Knives, where master knife-maker Aidan Mackinnon creates bespoke blades for the culinary armoury of serious chefs, then a visit to Iranian-Australian artist Elnaz Nourizadeh’s shopfront ceramics studio. Finally, with Coburg proclaimed as “kebab capital of Australia”, we hit Chorba Cafe for a brilliant Turkish lunch.

The prison looks very different to when some of Victoria’s most imfamous criminals called it home.

Back in the day, Pentridge was dubbed the “Bluestone Palace”, but let’s not romance the stone’s colour. Grey-black is not the new blue, nor the old one.

Convicts quarried the hard, dark basalt to form the 1m-thick walls that would thereafter confine them. The Interlude’s builders, working with modern power tools, still took two weeks to cut through each wall between the old cells.

The project’s lively historian-museologist Katrin Strohl knows more about Pentridge than seems possible. Over an epic session of Olivine delicacies and Austrian wine, she shares backstories from the demise of 1920s gangster Squizzy Taylor to the 1980 birth of Shantaram, the best-selling, shaggy-dog tale that began its escape journey right here.

There are so many standout elements at The Interlude, but dining at North & Common is a top contender. This is where chef Mark Glenn’s menu meets the 60-page wine list, and where a sharp waiter-sommelier complements your, say Abrohlos Islands scallops, or slow-roasted Flinders Island lamb shoulder with a finely tuned wine suggestion.

The relaxation pool at The Interlude.

Dining here is a leisurely event. Following a complex dessert, you’re so well fed and watered that you think you might never eat again. But postprandial remorse soon fades and, sure enough, next night you go, as the song says, back, Jack and do it again.

Wilde, once Reading Gaol’s prisoner C33, said that as we read history, we should be “appalled not by the crimes that the wicked have committed but by the punishments the good have inflicted”. The walls and yards of B Division were instruments of that punishment.

Their redemption from sullen structures into The Interlude’s stately pleasure dome was wrought by creative hands at Konzepte architects and CHADA interior designers, who should take a deep bow. Checking out, I flip through my playlist for a cheeky, get-out-of-jail hit. I Fought the Law? Rubber Bullets? Enough irony. The Interlude deserves something lush, big-hearted, declarative. Cue Unchained Melody.

In the know

The Interlude, including North & Common and Olivine, is in Coburg, 8km from Melbourne CBD; suites with queen bed (no twin beds) from $699.

Various packages are available, such as Introduction to The Interlude, which includes Time Travel with Wine, Tea Blending and other experiences. Breakfast $39 a head. Prices available on request for the Coburg Makers and Creators day tour.

John Borthwick was a guest of The Interlude.