The Exford Hotel was built in 1914 to replace an earlier hotel first known as the Sportsman's Arms and built in 1854.

  It is a rare intact example of an Edwardian hotel in the city and creates an impressive gateway to the "Chinatown" precinct of Little Bourke Street. Historically it is a late entry to a chain of hotels built for the Staughton family, which hitherto had made their fortune from grazing.

A three storeyed and parapeted brick hotel, which adopts the traditional splay-corner plan and a conservative classical exterior, divided horizontally by string mouldings and minor entablatures at each floor line.

Otherwise, ornamentation is confined to the notable Arts and Crafts leaded window designs and internal Art Metal ceilings with, external, a segment arch placed in the parapet on each frontage. The parapet arch is framed with piers which extend below the cornice line to a stylised corbel.

These arches and their piers (plus the leaded casement windows) are the only distinctively Edwardian traits in an otherwise typical Victorian period exterior. Inside the ground floor held public and private bars, two parlours, spirit store and servery. Upstairs there were sitting rooms and many bedrooms, opening into the street frontages and a rear light court.