Garden State Hotel: a pub for the city
The Garden State Hotel in Melbourne is created for a 24 hour city.
With a range of food outlets and covering a space of 2000 square metres, it sits on the site of the former Rosati's restaurant and a former textile mill in Flinders Lane.
Its business model has it trading until 5am on weekends and offering food ranging from kiosk-style $9 avocado and vegemite on bread to fine-dining $60 lamb shoulders,
It is designed for people who live and work in the CBD, a new breed of clientele.
"That was very much in our minds as we designed this place," owner Matt Mullins told the Australian Financial Review. "People who live around the corner ... might join you for a meal or an evening."
Mullins and his brother Andy are co-directors of Sand Hill Road, which owns the pub business, along with Tom Birch and Doug Maskiell.
They brought in Technē Architecture which completely revamped the place. The $9 million redevelopment saw the 120-year-old building gutted. It was replaced with a new five-level building with restaurants and bars overlooking a new internal garden with stepped courtyard.
Sand Hill Road has a 40 year lease on the building so it’s in there for the long term.
The hotel is designed for a city that’s changing.
Rob Adams, Melbourne's director of city design, says back in the 1980s, there were fewer than 700 apartments in the CBD. It’s a different proposition now.
"You've now got 28,000-plus," Adams told the Australian Financial Review "You're going to get an additional 50,000 to 60,000 units within 20 to 30 years' time."
That means planning not only getting the right balance between commercial and residential accommodation but actually creating the infrastructure to support a rapidly growing CBD population that lives and works in the city.
That is the business case for the Garden State Hotel.
by Leon Gettler, 4th August 2016
