Adelphi Hotel

The pool at the Adelphi starts on the roof and finishes about two metres past it, out over Flinders Lane. Its bottom is glass, so every length is swum in view of anyone on the pavement who thinks to look up. The building went up in 1938 as a warehouse for the rag trade. In 1989 the architects Denton Corker Marshall bought it, stacked three floors on its eight and drew the pool as a shipping container, and in 1992 they opened a hotel meant, by its own account, as an antidote to the staid luxury of hotels the world over. The Hachem studio, brought in by new owners in 2013, has kept up the argument. The reception desk is a wire sculpture of a horse and carriage, lit pink and gold. In one bathroom a face painted in black and white covers the walls, so nobody bathes alone.

Recommended for anyone curious what architects build when they are also the client, and for couples who would rather spend the evening in the lanes than in a hotel bar, which is as well. For now the Adelphi has neither a bar nor a restaurant, only somewhere new to eat that it says is opening soon, so dinner is out in Flinders Lane, where Supernormal and Cumulus Inc are neighbours. In a building eight metres wide, the Palatial Suite runs to 100 square metres and a hallway of its own, with a bedroom on one side, a lounge on the other and room for four. The pool is open to guests from seven in the morning until eight at night and, for now, to nobody else, so the rest of Melbourne makes do with the view from underneath.