An 1880s building in the historic heart of Emerald Hill is not the obvious place for a bathhouse. else has made it one. Spread across three levels of a heritage shell, the raw brick and old timber left to speak for themselves, it stacks mineral pools, cold plunges and saunas beneath two open-air rooftop pools where you bathe with the South Melbourne sky overhead. There is an alpine cabin and a vitality pool. The bones are Victorian. The ritual is Nordic. A five-million-dollar restoration that took its heritage delays on the chin and kept the building intact. Sky bathing above a nineteenth-century street. Worth the wait.

else BATHHOUSE, South Melbourne
A five-million-dollar restoration of an 1880s Emerald Hill building, stacking mineral pools, cold plunges and saunas beneath two open-air rooftop pools. Victorian bones, Nordic ritual.

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