Tom Wills Room

The Tom Wills Room is one of the Melbourne Cricket Club’s premium dining rooms, and it is booked rather than walked into. That puts it in competition with restaurants in Melbourne rather than with anything else at the ground, because a member deciding where to take guests is comparing it against the city.

The room did not read that way. Like most dining space inside a stand it presented as venue infrastructure that happened to serve food, and the challenge was to make it worth choosing on its own terms without pretending it was somewhere other than a stadium. A room that overreaches into fine dining in that setting is no more convincing than one that looks like a function space.

Greater Group reimagined the space completely rather than refreshing it, and the vocabulary is deliberately that of a city dining room. Rust leather banquettes with rolled bolster backs are fixed on exposed brass discs, brass rod screens divide the seating into defined settings, and the walls carry perforated metal panelling against olive tones. Tabletops are marble set into timber edging, the floor is dark herringbone parquet, and a feature light installation runs over the bar.

The register was pitched at casual dining rather than formal, which is the judgement the whole room turns on. Booth seating, brass and parquet read as a restaurant a member would choose on a Friday, and the detailing is resolved closely enough at eye level, in the bolster fixings and the table edges, to hold up at the distance a seated diner actually reads a room from.

The Tom Wills Room took Silver for Interior Design, Hospitality, Casual at the 2024 Melbourne Design Awards, followed by shortlists at the Australian and WORLD Design Awards in 2025. It was entered and judged as a casual dining interior, which is the clearest external evidence that the room now reads as a restaurant rather than as stadium hospitality.

For the Club that changes what the room can be sold as. A dining room that stands comparison with the city is bookable for reasons other than the fixture, which is the difference between a space that trades on event days and one that trades on the rest of the calendar as well.