Project Team

Interior Design: Marcos Davidson
AV: Audioworks

Melbourne really knows how to make old seem new again. There are bars on rooftops, cafes in car parks and galleries on alley walls. Now the city’s love affair with recycled cityscapes has stretched to the site of an old servo.

Tyranny of Distance has parked itself in an old service station in Windsor. The look is industrial chic with an artistic streak. Where once there were petrol
pumps now there are bar stools and café tables where patrons fill up on espresso and stiff drinks. The kitchen is housed in the old ‘lubritorium’ where beat-up cars have given way to homemade flatbreads.

The oil and grease is gone and in its place is a café/bar that is set to become a Southside destination.

Tyranny owners Carlo Colosimo (Lounge, Big Mouth Café, Two Fingers Café) and George Loukas (Tusk, Blue Elephant, Virgin Mary) commissioned several
Melbourne artists to handle Tyranny’s design. Led by Melbourne jeweller and goldsmith, Marcos Davidson, the approach focused on a unique recycling philosophy that lends Tyranny a real Bauhaus flavour.

The result is an accidental gallery of recycled parts and artisan labour. Lampshades were made from vulcanised fibre stitched together like old boots. Gas
bottles have been fashioned into outdoor lamps, old bank notes became tables, graffiti hides old sins on a feature wall and a window covering has been designed in the image of a vintage meat safe.

A Melbourne based jeweller and goldsmith, Marcos Davidson makes custom jewellery and architectural fittings such as chandeliers and door handles. His work is exhibited in the National Gallery’s permanent collection and he regularly exhibits in private galleries
around Melbourne.

Davidson says Tyranny had no design concept as such, but ended up with a real Bauhaus flavour because of the way that they incorporated craft elements into the architecture and basic design. Davidson’s idea was to retain some of the industrial feel of the original service station while adding warmth to the look and feel of the café/bar. The artists were encouraged to recycle objects and breathe new life into unconventional materials.

Materials that were traditionally industrial, hardy and
functional became objects d’art. An old compressor sits at the base of a totem pole that serves as an outdoor heater and barbeque gas bottles have been turned into lights. The table tops are made out of recycled plastic and old bank notes. Other tables sit on bases made out of water tank frames.

The cutlery has been bashed with a hammer by jeweller Dan Scurry to give it a little bit of a knocked around look. In the back room a big steel plate had been set into one of the windows. Davidson found a picture of a vintage 1930s meat safe with small air holes and copied that design feature into the window by drilling about 1700 holes into the steel.

Davidson’s work at Tyranny includes custom designed lampshades made out of vulcanised fibre, a material which is traditionally used to make gaskets and washers.

“I bought an inflatable swimming pool and soaked the fibre until it was soft, then with the assistance of a boot-maker who gave us stitching material, I put together like boots.”

Davidson made the bar out of zinc which he soldered together seamlessly. “Zinc is not a toxic material, so it’s not dangerous to work with. It’s actually quite good for you.”

He designed the ‘totem pole’ gas heater and fashioned old barbeque gas bottles into lamps.

“These are great examples of how we looked at recycling as reusing materials and objects in untraditional ways.”

As well as creating many of Tyranny’s design features himself, Davidson enlisted the help of several Melbourne artists to achieve the Bauhaus look. All of them were encouraged to use materials which they might not normally use.

Dan Scurry is a local jeweller who works in titanium, plastic and a variety of unconventional materials. He handpicked all the cutlery used at Tyranny and then
hammered the ends to turn them into a more artful dinner service.

Nicholas Jones is Melbourne based book sculptor who used the vulcanised fibre to create design features on the walls and against the bar.

Graffiti artist Fred Fowler (aka Nu Rock) was commissioned to create a frieze on several of the walls as well as a feature piece next to the bar . As well as tying in with the graffiti pieces on one of the buildings opposite the bar, it also meant that they didn’t have to clean up the existing graffiti left by the previous owners – Fowler just incorporated it into his work.

Photos: Alex Gott-Cumbers, Anni Davenport, Daniel May