West Melbourne’s renowned architect 

In 1967 John McNabb was offered a job as project architect on what would later be named the Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre.

“Ironically, I was drawing up formwork details for the contractor in December 1967 when I should have been down at Portsea surf lifesaving, and Harold Holt disappeared that morning,” he said.

Apart from the historical quirk, there is another meaning for McNabb; It occupies the second chronological highlight in his career as a renowned architect.

Before it is his job working on a building on the corner of Little Collins and Elizabeth streets when he was 22, and later came his work on the New Parliament House in Canberra and Federation Square.

“I was project architect on the central zone of Parliament House, so I had to defend why we were always late on our paperwork,” Mr McNabb said.

“And the work I did on that brought me into consideration to assist the government on Federation Square.”

Mr McNabb, whose partner and two daughters are also architects, moved to West Melbourne in 2003 – into a converted warehouse apartment for which he and his wife designed the fit-out.

“It’s a 1920s building, it was initially a Gilbey’s Gin distillery,” he said.

“Then it was bought by the Herald and Weekly Times and it was used as one of their staging posts for their daily edition newspaper. They published them in Flinders St and sent them across here for distribution in trucks.”

Mr McNabb said they were fitting out some of the apartments for a client after they were subdivided in 2001 and ended up buying one.

“The apartments have gritty finishes on the wall, off warm concrete columns, red concrete floors, some of them have little terraces but not all,” he said.

He started studying architecture at RMIT at 16 years old and said his interest with buildings began as a child growing up in Sandringham, building huts and designing buildings.

These days he runs a firm with his partner Jennifer Gomes and does volunteer work for the Friends of Queen Victoria Market, proposing alternative plans for the market’s redevelopment •