I thought this suburb was the fanciest place in the world. Then I moved here

It is late afternoon in Travancore. The light is soft and flattering, and the heritage facades of stately homes are showing off their best features. The front lawns glow a mellow golden green, scattered with the confetti of fallen elm leaves. If you’re off the main road, and you edit the Land Rovers and Audis out of your mind’s eye, it could easily be 1953. Travancore has that place-out-of-time look. It is like a very polite time capsule someone has lost in the inner city.

When I was a child, my father would sometimes drive me down Mooltan Street so I could stare at the art deco apartment buildings with their rounded Juliet balconies. I thought Travancore must be the fanciest place in the world and I was determined that one day I would live there. Years later, it became my neighbourhood and has retained that allure from my childhood. If ogling old houses is your thing, you can’t beat Travancore.

I used to think old Trav could do with an injection of youth and cultural diversity. Sometimes I would even call it Melbourne’s last white enclave, in the sense that it has historically been a stronghold of retirees in beautiful, heritage-listed homes who have no desire to leave until escorted out by time. The houses, often rare examples of the 19th-century Arts and Crafts style, are less like real estate than like long-term relationships. You don’t sell them; you are eventually separated from them.

But old Trav has developed a second personality. You can see it most clearly along Mount Alexander Road, where apartment buildings have begun to sprout. One of the first big apartment buildings emerged on the site of the old Lombard paper factory, destroyed in 2004 by a huge fire that took more than a week to extinguish.

It was that advent of the new apartment buildings that caused Travancore – at that time a hidden place with a tiny population of just 839 – to change, in a process less of gentrification and more of “youthification”. An influx of university students, young professionals and city commuters means that Travancore is now more culturally diverse and younger than the average inner-Melbourne suburb. The median age of a Travancore resident is now 33. I know, I was shocked too. It’s still small, but its population has grown to more than 2100.

Travancore, a wedge between Mount Alexander Road and Moonee Ponds Creek, used to be a place where nothing much happened except for the annual Travancore Dog Park calendar, where locals display their pooches to raise money for the Lost Dogs Home. The new apartments brought a new demographic: younger, busier, frequentl