Architecture

Hotel Hotel and The Nishi Building

Everyone is talking about Hotel Hotel.  I’m going to put it out there and say that Hotel Hotel (along with that epic James Turrell exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia) could be to Canberra what MONA has been to Hobart in recent years.  It’s got everyone talking about Canberra again.

Hotel Hotel is the brainchild of the Molonglo Group, a development company headed up by brothers Johnathan and Nectar Efkarpidis, who favour a collaborative design process. Combining the considerable talents of Melbourne based firms Fender Katsalidis, OCULUS and March Studio, with Japan’s Suppose Design Office, alongside a host of individual furniture designers, artists, and other independent creatives, the development of Hotel Hotel is a feat of logistics as much as design and engineering.  The hotel, and the Nishi building it is housed within, brings together the best and bravest in Australian design.

Stuart Harrison gives us the full story.

Written
by
Stuart Harrison

Canberra’s Nishi Building, housing Hotel Hotel, is made up of two parts – a conventional glass box with timber screening on the street side (with office space in the upper levels); and a grand curving concrete block containing the hotel rooms and apartments on the west side. Photo – Sean Fennessy for The Design Files.

Detail from Canberra’s Nishi Building, housing Hotel Hotel. Photo – Sean Fennessy for The Design Files.

GREAT foyer space designed by Melbourne based March Studio – thousands of pieces of recycled timber form a rich tunnel of wood pushing you up the grand stair. Photo – Sean Fennessy for The Design Files.

Hotel Hotel foyer, also designed by March Studio, who have used stacked precast concrete planks, woven together to form walls and screening. Photo – Sean Fennessy for The Design Files.

The hotel rooms feature heavily textured materials alongside a considered edit of both vintage and commissioned furniture and lighting. Photo – Sean Fennessy for The Design Files.

The hotel rooms feature heavily textured materials – raw concrete finishes and OSB (Oriented Strand Board – aka ‘chipboard’) feature throughout the rooms.  Photo – Sean Fennessy for The Design Files.

‘The Creative Room’. The hotel rooms feature heavily textured materials – not a piece of plasterboard in sight. OSB (Oriented Strand Board – aka ‘chipboard’) lines the walls of the rooms, whilst a considered edit of both vintage and commissioned furniture pieces from Australian designers such as Adam Goodrum fill the rooms. Photo – Sean Fennessy for The Design Files.

The hotel rooms feature a considered edit of both contemporary and vintage furniture and lighting. Photo – Sean Fennessy for The Design Files.

The hotel rooms feature heavily textured materials – not a piece of plasterboard in sight. A considered edit of both vintage and commissioned furniture can be found in each room. Photo – Sean Fennessy for The Design Files.

‘The Meandering Room’ ensuite. Photo – Sean Fennessy for The Design Files.

In the hotel foyer concrete precast planks are stacked, woven together to form walls and screening. Photo – Sean Fennessy for The Design Files.

Hotel foyer. Photo – Sean Fennessy for The Design Files.

Hotel library. Photo – Sean Fennessy for The Design Files.

Textured details in the hotel foyer. Photo – Sean Fennessy for The Design Files.

Details from Hotel Hotel’s Monster Kitchen and Bar. Photo – Sean Fennessy for The Design Files.

Details from Hotel Hotel’s Monster Kitchen and Bar. Photo – Sean Fennessy for The Design Files.

Writer
Stuart Harrison
2nd of April 2015

Canberra has always been a fascinating place to visit – with an original city plan by Walter Burley and Marion Mahoney Griffin, great post-war architecture, heaps of trees and a string of major cultural and arts events. But also boring – not much to do ‘at night’, not much of a sense of ‘city’ in the bustling sense of the word. The New Acton precinct has changed that somewhat, a new piece of city that offers some of the diverse activity that makes a city a city. It’s just to the south-west of ‘Civic’, the notional centre of Canberra. Within this precinct, master-planned by OCULUS and Fender Katsalidis, is the Nishi Building (housing Hotel Hotel over 3 levels), the last and best piece in the New Acton jigsaw. The precinct has been developed by Molonglo Group, with Nishi as the sustainable showcase.

Sitting just across the road from Roy Grounds’ fantastic Academy of Sciences building (1957), the Nishi Building is the very definition of ‘mixed-use’ – with a range of different functions inside, and this is central to its success. Hotel Hotel is the signature tenant – a 68 room big boutique hotel – in the same building is a good cinema, office space, shops, carparking and heaps of apartments that share lobby and foyer spaces with the hotel. It’s this mix of functions AND good design that has led to the success of this building and precinct. The building fronts onto perhaps Canberra’s first street (as opposed to road or highway) – Phillip Law Street, awash with people, bikes and cars together, not separated out as was often the case with 20th century planning.

The Nishi building’s primary entry is from this street. Get ready – within is March Studio’s GREAT foyer space – thousands of pieces of recycled timber form a rich tunnel of wood pushing you up the grand stair. Atop is the multi-directional hotel foyer, also designed by March Studio. This space is a regular hotel foyer turned inside out – the kitchen on display, people eating and drinking in the central space, the reception to one side, multiple entries, giant fireplace – it’s moody lounge room crossed with train station. In this space, March turn to concrete – precast planks are stacked, woven together to form walls and screening. This treatment extends outside to the more traditional hotel porte-cochere type entry on the west façade.

The warm hotel rooms are almost rustic – heavily textured materials with great depth – not a piece of plasterboard in sight. OSB (Oriented Strand Board) lines the back walls of the generous rooms, creating hanging display and desk space, and freeing up the rest of the room for custom tables and designers chairs toward the fully glazed wall. Melbourne-based Broached Commissions has curated a range of crafted furniture and art commissions throughout the hotel, including fantastic diamond ‘feasting tables’ designed by Adam Goodrum that pick up on the original ideas of diverse forests the Griffins envisaged for Canberra’s outskirts.

Nishi is made up of two parts – a more conventional glass box with timber screening on the street side (with office space in the upper levels); and a grand curving concrete block containing the hotel rooms and apartments on the west side. This façade follows the roadways that form the edge of the site, and uses angle-ended concrete walls to create a shifting robust framework, timber windows within. The curved form of the hotel and apartment block results in a curving corridor inside, lined with Japanese gate-like timber frames that turn the typical ordinary hotel corridor into pleasurable trip between the lift and your room.

Hotels are pseudo public buildings – particularly the foyer and function spaces, and in a town with lots of state architecture it’s interesting that a privately owned one has this sense of a community, interaction and permeability. Hotels like this one are catalysts and trend setters – and Hotel Hotel embraces this role as a guide to the wider city. New eateries and renovated hotels are clustering around the new precinct. Both Hotel Hotel and the Nishi Building it sits within are the result of many authors – and like the spaces inside, the lines are blurred between them, all operating under the same game plan of craft, richness and design abundance.

The grand curving concrete block containing Hotel Hotel guest rooms and apartments on the west side of the Nishi Building. Photo – Sean Fennessy for The Design Files.

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