The Collectionist Hotel is a collaboration involving four local design studios, who have come together to create a design hotel unlike any other in Australia. Each studio has been charged with the task of designing ten rooms – resulting in a 40 room hotel with the most diverse and unique interiors we’ve seen in a long time.
The hotel is the vision of entrepreneurs Daniel Symonds and Toby Raphael, who turned to designer Andrew Cliffe to curate the overall look and feel of the hotel. His brief? To create a hotel in which no two rooms are the same.
‘The brief was for every room to be different – a massive task for one designer’ says Cliffe. ‘Originally, I was imagining ten designers doing four rooms each, but reality set in and this switched to four designers doing ten rooms each.’
Amongst the stellar line-up of designers involved are Andrew’s own studio, The World is Round, alongside Yasmine Ghoniem and Katy Svalbe of award-winning Sydney design studio Amber Road, followed by Matt Sheargold and Susie Willis of newly formed Willis Sheargold, and Byron Bay based team Lily Goodwin and Josh Cain of Pattern Studio.
We’re particularly enamoured by Amber Road’s design response. Their rooms are richly layered with colour, pattern, texture and original artwork. ‘Ultimately, our goal here was to transform a series of non-descript rooms into a chasm of explosive colour and pattern’ says designer Yasmine Ghoniem. ‘Our objective was to conjure a specific memory, a holiday, a dream, ultimately something that would charm a strong emotive response from the guest.’
The hotel founders, Daniel Symonds and Toby Raphael, are known for their disruptive and creative entrepreneurial approach. They’re also the co-founders of ‘Freespace‘, a pop-up accommodation concept which converts a variety of unutilised spaces, such as university colleges, into flexible accomodation during peak periods.
‘Individualised travel experiences are what the modern-day guest is craving’ says Daniel Symonds. ‘This trend will drive the shift to developing hotels in more varied locations, unusual buildings and the adaptive reuse of unused space… That’s why you’re starting to see the conversion of various styles of spaces into unique accommodation offerings.’
The Collectionist Hotel
9/13 Marsden Street
Camperdown, New South Wales
