“The barista at the place next door has a tattoo of a possum on his forearm, and when you ask about it he just says, 'Fitzroy Gardens, 2019 — long story.'”

Little Collins Street at 8 AM is all heel-clicks and tram bells and someone in a suit balancing a flat white like it's a surgical instrument. You come up from Flinders Street Station into that particular Melbourne morning light — not quite grey, not quite gold, the kind that makes everything look like a film still from a movie you half-remember — and the city is already several coffees ahead of you. The block between Swanston and Exhibition is dense with laneway turnoffs, each one promising a bar or a dumpling house or a vintage shop that may or may not still exist. Next Hotel Melbourne sits at 103, street-level entrance, no grand portico, no doorman in a top hat. Just a glass door between a café and what looks like a financial services office. You almost walk past it. That's the Melbourne move: the good stuff rarely announces itself.

The lobby is doing something interesting — it's trying to be a living room and mostly succeeding. There's a communal table where a couple of guests are working on laptops, and a small bar area that seems to operate on the principle that you might want a glass of wine at 4 PM without having to put shoes back on. The check-in is digital-forward, which means you're either delighted or mildly panicked depending on your relationship with QR codes. I fumble with mine for a full minute before a staff member materialises with the calm patience of someone who does this forty times a day.

The room, the noise, the shower pressure question

The room is compact in the way new-build city hotels always are, but it's been thought about. The bed faces the window rather than the TV, which feels like a philosophical statement. You wake up to a slice of Collins Street rooftops and, if you crane, a thin wedge of sky between buildings. The mattress is firm without being punitive. The pillows — and I realise this is the kind of detail that marks me as someone who has stayed in too many hotels — are genuinely good, the kind where you don't immediately shove one onto the floor.

Shower pressure is strong, hot water arrives fast, and the bathroom has that clean-lined tile look that photographs well and is easy to keep tidy. The toiletries are Australian-made, something botanical, nothing you'd write home about but nothing you'd complain about either. There's a full-length mirror positioned so you can't avoid it getting out of the shower, which feels like an act of aggression at 6:30 AM but is probably just good design.

What Next gets right is location without pretending it invented it. Little Collins is one of Melbourne's great through-streets — not a destination, a corridor, which means everything passes through. Degraves Street is a three-minute walk south, with its tourist-density espresso joints, but go one block further and you hit Centre Place, where the coffee is better and the crowds thinner. Hardware Lane runs parallel to the north, and on a weeknight the Italian restaurants spill tables onto the cobblestones and someone is always playing accordion, which should be annoying but isn't.

“Melbourne doesn't have a centre so much as a series of overlapping neighbourhoods that all think they're the centre — and Little Collins runs through the argument like a seam.”

The honest thing: you hear the street. Not badly — not keep-you-up badly — but the trams on Collins Street register as a low rumble, and Friday night brings the particular frequency of people who've had three drinks and are deciding on a fourth. I slept fine with the window closed, but if you're a light sleeper, bring earplugs or request a higher floor. The WiFi held steady through a video call, which is more than I can say for several places twice the price.

There's a painting in the hallway on the seventh floor — abstract, mostly orange, slightly too large for the wall — that looks like it was chosen by someone who genuinely liked it rather than by a procurement team. It's crooked by about two degrees. I noticed it every time I walked past and never once wanted it straightened.

Breakfast isn't included but the ground-floor café does a solid bacon and egg roll for under a tenner, and the coffee is above-average Melbourne standard, which means it would be exceptional almost anywhere else on earth. If you want something more deliberate, Patricia Coffee Brewers is a seven-minute walk on Little Bourke — standing room only, no Wi-Fi, no seats, just very serious coffee served by very serious people. It's perfect.

Walking out

Leaving on a Sunday morning, Little Collins is a different street. The suits are gone. A woman is walking a greyhound in a knitted jumper — the dog, not the woman — and the dumpling place on the corner that was heaving on Saturday night has its shutters half-down, someone inside stacking chairs. The tram stop on Collins Street is quiet enough that you can hear pigeons. You notice the laneways differently now, the ones you walked past on arrival without looking. Hosier Lane is two blocks south if you want the street art, but the unmarked alley behind the hotel has its own piece — a huge painted magpie, mid-swoop, that nobody seems to have Instagrammed yet.

Rooms at Next Hotel Melbourne start around $142 a night, which in CBD Melbourne buys you a sharp room, a location that makes a car pointless, and a street that does most of the entertaining for you. The free tram zone covers everything between Flinders and Queen Victoria Market, so your transport costs within the grid are exactly zero.