Mailing It In

I've never been involved with designing a hotel but I'm fairly confident that the process begins with a ton of moodboards and lengthy meetings about 'concept' and 'story'. Even the most basic motel these days seems to employ armies of theatrical consultants who dig around to find anything that could help the property 'speak to place', 'sit lightly on the land' and allow guests to 'fully immerse' in the history of the site and its surrounds. "This shade of taupe exactly matches the whiskers of an endangered native quoll!" a marketing guru surely cries, before sliding across their six figure invoice.  

The Adelaide Marriott Hotel, which has been built from the bones of the city's colonial-era General Post Office Building, is one of those rare properties that I expect didn't need a ton of nonsense pantomiming in order to surface a properly authentic and engaging backstory. The GPO building is a dream prompt to build a narrative around the way Australians once communicated across our vast, arid continent - via post, telegraph and telegram.

Here, in this 14-storey, 285-key property, that narrative is written in the aerial photography of the old telegraph stations that once delivered messages from Augusta to Port Darwin, that sit in front of the lifts on every level. It's in the portraits of the first Postmaster General, Sir Charles Todd and his wife Alice, the namesake of Alice Springs, that decorate the Art Deco-style Penny Blue restaurant (a 'Penny Blue' is a rare British stamp). And it's in the curved sculptures that represent the pneumatic tubes that once trundled telegrams across the country, or the copper lines that transmitted signals across the city. It's stirring stuff, and I imagine the marketing fluffers didn't need to throw nearly as many jazz hands as usual to come up with it all.