When the Regent opened on 8 November 1929, it cost £300,000, an extraordinary sum at the dawn of the Great Depression. Hoyts built it to imitate Hollywood's golden age, a cinema that was also a stage and, above all, a spectacle in itself. The Melbourne architect Charles Hollinshed designed it with help from Brisbane's Richard Gailey Junior and a young Aaron Bolot. Inside, designers mixed Art Deco, Spanish Gothic, Baroque and Empire styles with cheerful disregard for which century belonged to which. The point was never accuracy. The point was to make a clerk or a shop girl, paying a few pence for a Saturday matinee, feel for a couple of hours like visiting royalty.

The grand foyer survives as the great set piece, roughly twenty-two metres long and three and a half storeys high. Its vaulted ceiling carries painted figures in medieval costume, shields flanked by lions, and sunbursts ringed by lanterns. Walls drip with pale plaster tracery so dense and creamy that heritage architects reach for the word Rococo. Velvet curtains hang from blind balconies that open onto nothing but mirrors. At the centre, the white marble staircase swells outward at its base, wide enough for the crowds of 1929 to ascend in their hundreds toward a mezzanine promenade. The entrance hall before it is gentler but no less theatrical, its barrel-vaulted ceiling worked in bronze-painted plaster, its end vaults bright with painted scenes.

The Regent has been mourned twice. In 1979 and 1980, the original auditorium was gutted and carved into a four-screen complex, and a campaign rose to defend it. The building, foyer and all, was placed on the Queensland Heritage Register in 1992. Then in 2008, as developers prepared to clear most of the site for a planned office tower, a new Save The Regent group formed, an echo of the first. Members marched on the building's Elizabeth Street facade. They argued it still did the one thing it was built to do, show films. They lost. Between June 2011 and March 2012 the bulk of the Regent came down, and stone grotesques the public had been promised would be saved were destroyed instead, drawing a council fine.

Demolition stopped at the heritage boundary, and so the threshold, the entrance hall and the grand foyer endured. In November 2014 the Brisbane City Council reopened those rooms as a visitor information centre, returning crowds to a space designed for exactly that. The promised tower stalled for years, its design swelling from one plan to the next while the foyer waited, marooned and magnificent, behind a vacant lot. Walk in today and the contradiction is the whole story: a fragment of fantasy preserved because enough people refused to let all of it disappear, a marble staircase that now leads, in the most literal sense, nowhere, and is loved anyway.