It's only when you see the apartment building from above that you notice there's something different about it.
It's perfectly circular.
The others in Little Collins Street are square or rectangular, as buildings tend to be, but this one is distinctly round.
Building a perfectly round apartment building doesn't make any sense.
How can you hang a painting on a curved wall?
You can, and they did. A massive one in fact: 15 high and 120 long, stretching the entire circumference of the building.
And people came in their droves to see it.
This building was never meant to be a place where people lived, it was meant to be a place where people were amazed and astounded.
In the days before cinema, "going to the pictures" literally meant going to see an actual picture.
Sure, going to see a painting can be fun, but what if you really wanted to take the experience to the next level and fully immerse yourself in the artist's work?
They enjoyed a bit of a golden period during the last decade of the 19th century.
Effectively was a huge circular building in which massive, 360 degree paintings were hung.
The paintings were usually they were as realistic as the artist could achieve.
The idea was to let the viewer feel like they were actually at the Battle of Waterloo without having to go to the trouble of travelling to Belgium and being shot at by a Frenchman.
Rocks, dirt, trees, and props were often placed around the base of the painting in the way a stage might be decorated for a play.
Canvas Documentaries: Panoramic Entertainments in Nineteenth-century Australia and New Zealand, likened going to modern day IMAX cinemas.
"People loved the immersive quality because they were they felt you were there," she said.
They also fulfilled a need for a society searching for more sophisticated forms of entertainment.
"This is part of that 19th century expansion of literacy by the industrial revolution. People were interested and informed,"
"Instead of going to for the girlie shows"
How did they come to Melbourne?
Howard H. Gross and Isaac Newton Reed had established a successful company in their home city, launching in the early 1880s with a painting of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
After visiting Sydney for the city's 1888 International Exhibition, Gross and Reed decided to expand their business to Australia.
They set up exhibitions that rotated between Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, starting with the Battle of Gettysburg in Sydney and the Battle of Waterloo in Melbourne.
The works were monumental undertakings, requiring a team of artists to painstakingly recreate an event at which none of them was present.
To achieve as close to reality as possible, huge panoramic photographs were taken and sketches made at locations, such as the Gettysburg battlefield, and dozens of people who were actually there were interviewed.
This, sprinkled with a likely significant amount of artistic license, formed the basis for the paintings.
Individual artists had particular responsibilities: some worked solely on the landscape, some did the figures, some just did horses.
Once the painting was finished, the next and perhaps just as difficult step was to roll the thing up: not easy when you're talking about something 100 long and 15 high.
That process involved fixing a roller to one end of the work, and slowly rolling it up over the course of six days.
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