Melbourne’s Vespa House has been in the same family, in the same shopfront, for nearly 70 years. For Dean Tonon, keeping it alive means honouring the past – while somehow making space for the future
Running a business comes with a certain amount of responsibility; financial pressures, customer expectations, operational challenges and all the strategic and administrative juggling that comes with it. But the man in charge of an inner-Melbourne Vespa dealership, Dean Tonon, adds a different kind of responsibility to his management requirements, and it’s one that can’t be measured in spreadsheets or sales targets.
Because in 1951, just five years after Piaggio & Co created the very first Vespa scooter, Dean’s grandfather Vittorio – Tony to his friends, Nonno to Dean – immigrated to Australia with his wife and sons, one of them Dean’s father Frank, then aged nine. After living in an immigration camp, Tony got a job working as a mechanic for Bruce Small, the Australian distributor for various two-wheeled brands such as CZ, Vespa, Jawa and Malvern Star.
“And so he said, ‘Do you mind if I open my own little workshop?’ And they didn’t mind at all,” Frank Tonon, now 84, explains. “So he bought the property and built this.”
We’re standing out the back in the workshop where Frank, like his father before him, is servicing a scooter up on the hoist.
“We had a mechanic who stayed with with his son, and he walked out. So I said, ‘Stuff it, I’ve got to do something,’ so I started doing some of the services again.”
Working in the other corner of the workshop is Stefano, whom Frank describes as having “the golden hands”. A qualified mechanic, Stefano looks after all of the restoration and tuning work.
“Some of the things that he does is unbelievable, I tell you,” says Frank. “We never dreamt of those things back in the old days, because all it was was a scooter to go from A to B.”
On Stefano’s hoist is a Douglas Vespa, which were made under licence in the UK and the only type of Vespa available to Australian buyers when Frank’s father Tony launched the shop in 1956.
Before he can say any more, Frank’s son Dean appears.
“Sorry, Dad. The GS is here,” he announces, before we all head out the front to watch a beautifully restored Vespa being unloaded from a truck. It’s been on display at Melbourne’s Heide Museum.
“These are Dad’s favourite models,” explains Dean. “The GS, made between 1959 and 1961. This is number five in the series… Sport Series – Grand Sport VS5.”
Once the scooter’s off the truck and tucked away safely inside the shop, Dean motions towards the rear of the building.
“Have you seen the back-back room?” he asks as we thread our way through the workshop, past benches stacked with tools and parts and into a low-lit, narrow corridor.
Frank looks up from the wheel he’s fitting to a modern four-stroke and calls out as we pass through: “The junk room!”
At first glance, it’s a dense storage area – frames, tyre racks, piles of springs, bodywork on a makeshift mezzanine.
But look closer and a story begins to form.
“This was originally two shops, with houses upstairs – like a lot of little shops around here,” Dean explains. “My grandparents lived on one side, my aunt and uncle on the other. My dad and uncles grew up upstairs. You couldn’t just buy one; the two were on a single title, so Nonno had to stretch himself to buy both. I still don’t know how they managed it.”
On one wall stands a towering shelf of parts bins unlike any you’d find at Bunnings. These bins, still in regular use, were made by Dean’s grandfather from repurposed olive oil tins, each one laid on its side, cut open like a drawer, and painted with a number in thick white paint.
On top of one of the tins sits the original ledger scrawled in pencil – Tony’s handwriting still visible, cataloguing springs, floats and Vespa bits long since vanished from any supply chain.
I ask him whether he still feels his Nonno’s presence.
“Yeah,” he nods. “Especially when I come in here. When I come in here and I move the tins, and I clean up, and I go through boxes and I find his writing, and I go through books and I find his writing, I always get a nice feeling with that.
“To walk in the same places and to do the same things that he did – it hits home every time I do it.”
There’s something telling about these tins. Not just in their function, but in the way they mirror the spirit of Vespa House itself: practical, frugal, filled with memories and still going strong almost six decades later. There’s a wine press in another corner and, tucked beneath a bench, a stash of dusty, long-forgotten bottles of homemade wine.
It’s clear this was never just a workspace. It was – and still is – a patchwork of home life, family legacy and hands-on ritual. The tools that fixed scooters. The tins that held oil. The press that made the wine. Every corner holds the imprint of a life lived onsite, hands-on, passed down.
“I get that strong sense of remembering him with his dustcoat on, sitting over there and yelling at us, and making us laugh, and showing us things,” Dean says of his Nonno. “Yeah, I would see him shuffle through little areas and stuff and wonder what he was doing. And I knew he was always helping someone, he was always fixing something, he was always making something for a reason.”
But Dean’s connection to Vespa House was never a given. Like his father Frank, he spent his early career working in construction, before the showroom pulled him back in.
“All my mates said, ‘You’re going to end up in the shop’, and I always said, ‘Nah, nah, I’m doing building’, but they were right, I ended up in the shop.
“I just wanted to be like Dad,” he says. “I often said to my teachers, ‘How do I be like Dad?’”
He joined the business properly in the 1990s – initially in the showroom selling scooters, answering questions, getting a feel for the pace and rhythm of the shop. It’s a role now performed by Jamie, who’s engaging and friendly, and knows the place inside out.
“They didn’t want us in the back,” he says of his parents, referring to the workshop. “They wanted us to get an education – a qualification.”
Back then, the shop was still focused on the manual two-stroke Vespa models. But that began to change in the late-90s and early-2000s, with the arrival of the automatic four-strokes that would shift the market for good, bringing in new customers.
Even as Vespa House adapted to the new wave, the classics always remained important to the Tonons. Dean and Frank held on to what they could, tucking bikes and parts away, knowing their time would come again. “We’d already started to see the classics dwindling,” he says. “But Dad was doing everything himself back then – it was hard to keep up.”
Then came Covid. And, with it, an opportunity.
People wanted projects. They wanted something hands-on and nostalgic and fixable. Dean started selling off a few project bikes – some of the countless examples stashed in storage – and found himself fielding calls from younger riders.
“Thirty- and forty-somethings, the next generation of Vespa people. That’s when we started getting back into the classics properly.”
Dean leads me out of the shop and down the street to what he calls The Clubhouse – a nondescript terrace that was once the area’s after-school hub, now quietly housing what must be one of the most remarkable private Vespa collections in the country.
Inside is a wall-to-wall, bar-to-bar collection decades in the making. An obsession, no doubt – but one with purpose. It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust to what I’m seeing. If there’s one historic Vespa in this room, there’s got to be 40.
There’s bodywork stacked in piles and scooters in every possible state of undress. Running models, derelict models, registered models, restored models and sidecar models. It’s quite incredible. Advertising material from every era – faded posters, enamel signs and dealer paperwork.
Dean moves through it like someone who knows every inch – because he does – and he tells me that people often ask why Vespa House hasn’t turned into a museum.
“And I say, ‘Do you want to take tickets and show people around?’” Dean laughs.
We cross the road and step through a gate into the backyard of Frank’s house, the same yard where Dean spent his childhood.
“This was my playground,” he nods. “I used to kick the footy around down here and think I was Warwick Capper for some reason.”
The garden beds and trampoline he describes are long gone, but there are traces of what came after: scooter parts, wooden crates, salvaged panels and bits and pieces as far as you can see. This space, like the rooms across the road, has been overtaken by the shop’s slow, decades-old sprawl.
“There were bikes everywhere, parts stacked up, crates from new deliveries… we had to build a roof over it eventually, just to get it all under cover.” He points to a covered lean-to stacked with old engines, tagged and shelved. “That’s what I’ve been working through. Tagging it all – engines, bikes, parts. What year, what model, what goes with what.”
It’s a system he’s copied from Tony. “I’ll find Nonno’s little tags sometimes,” he says. “So I do the same thing. Little pieces of card, string, handwriting. Same thing.”
But it’s not easy.
“What do we throw out? What don’t we? That’s the hard part. And yeah, we’ve thrown out the wrong things before.”
Now there’s a deadline looming. The yard is set to be developed, which means everything – every part, every engine, every crate – has to be moved by the end of the year. “It’s forcing me to go through it all,” Dean says. “Prioritise. Make a plan.”
Some parts will be matched with scooters and restored. Others will be sold on. “We don’t want it all sitting in here forever,” he says. “We want to get a few more out on the road.”
But running a business like this is a balancing act. And not an easy one.
“People walk in and go, ‘I love the smell in here – can I bottle it?’” Dean says. “You’ve got that full sensory nostalgia thing going on, and at the same time, you’ve got to run a functional business.”
The goal now is to find the right balance.
The business has shifted over time. The demands have changed. But the space hasn’t. It’s still a shopfront on a busy street in Collingwood. The parts storage is spread across three buildings. The showroom is packed. The workshop’s full. The systems are part old-school, part modern. And the future? That’s a moving target.
“We need help with stuff like social media, the website,” Dean says. “We need to get the online store sorted out. We all ride, and we’re all into them, but it’s life and families and stuff first, you know?” He says that last sentence as if they’re somehow separate from the enormous task he has ahead of him.
“I’ve got to get it all out by the end of the year,” he says. “We’ll lose this space, so it’s forcing the issue.” There’s no grand plan beyond that. Not yet. Just the same steady rhythm Vespa House has always had.
“I’m 49 now,” Dean says. “I don’t know. We’ll see. Vespa turns 80 in 2026. We’re at 69 here. I think we’ll see 100 years in this shop.”
Dean believes Vespa House isn’t just the oldest Vespa dealership in Australia – but possibly the oldest in the world.
“As far as we know, yeah.”
Frank’s still servicing. Still test riding the serviced scooters. And still taking bins out, even when he shouldn’t. Dean watches with a mix of quiet pride and protective urgency.
“Part of it is empowering him,” he says. “Helping him to see what he’s built. The more I do, the more I get how overwhelming it was for him at times.”
In the showroom sits a large timber counter, salvaged from the local barbershop and repurposed like so many other pieces in the building. Within it sits a small black and white photo of Tony – rolling up his sleeve, eyes sharp, as if ready to get on with the job. Still watching over the shop, all these years later. And Reggie – Dean’s seven-year-old son – is the fourth generation Tonon to have lived up above the shop. “He’d come down into the showroom, jump on the bikes, press the horn. Just like we did.”
Whatever comes next, Dean knows there’s no walking away. Not when your family name is literally built into the beams of the place. Not when rooms, shelves and drawers still hold something your late grandfather touched.
Running a business comes with a certain amount of responsibility. But for Dean, it’s never just been about business. It’s about continuity. About carrying forward the work of his father, his grandfather – and maybe one day, passing it on again.
Be part of it
He’ll try, but Frank can’t do it forever…
VESPA HOUSE is looking for a modern Vespa technician – someone who knows their way around modern four-stroke automatics and is happy to work alongside a small, close-knit crew.
It’s a busy little shop with a long history and takes the ‘family-run’ moniker to the next level. Vespa experience helps, but it’s not essential. What matters is solid mechanical knowledge, a good attitude and an appreciation for the scooters, the community and the rich legacy of Vespa House.
Vespa House
155-157 Johnston St,
Collingwood, 3066
(03) 9417 0342
