“When we took the gamble to open a hotel, we were determined not to build a sleek designer hotel like you see everywhere, but one that would be faithful to the spirit of Cabarita,” says Elisha Bickle, who together with her sister Siobhan, bought the town’s Hideaway motel and oversaw its transformation into Halcyon House.

The Bickles are part of a shrewd Brisbane real-estate and hospitality dynasty with a proven knack for identifying untapped potential and breathing new life into overlooked locales. After discreetly operating a handful of the city’s most successful venues over the past decade – including Cloudland and the Press Club – the family has emerged as major players on the national scene. Halcyon House is their highest-profile project to date, a flagship of sorts that will be followed by a number of other ambitious projects.

“We wanted a house full of idiosyncrasies and memory-making potential,” explains Elisha. To that end, the sisters engaged designers with distinct yet differing styles to give the old motel a new lease of life: Sydney-based architect Virginia Kerridge and Brisbane-based interior designer Anna Spiro.

See inside Halcyon House, Australia's newest hotel

Kerridge faithfully updated the existing structure with her considered touch, reinterpreting the idea of the classic 1960s Australian beach motel. Perhaps the greatest endorsement for her work is that it appears as if she were never there at all.  

The same could never be said for the interiors – Spiro has imbued every corner of the 21-room property with her hallmark mixture of the collected, fanciful and nostalgic. No two rooms are the same; textiles, antiques, art and furnishings have been sourced from all over the globe – from estate sales as near as Brisbane and as far afield as the legendary Brimfield antiques fair in Massachusetts. And in a somewhat daring decision for a sun-drenched hotel, the walls of each room are entirely upholstered – each in a unique fabric.

If there was a Venn diagram of agenda-setting hotels, Halcyon House would sit somewhere between the chilled-out motel cool of Palm Springs’ Ace Hotel; the textile-rich, feminine indulgence of London’s Ham Yard Hotel; and the polished yet personal JK Place in Capri. In fact, the Bickles coaxed star hotelier Mauro De Riso away from the JK to head up Halcyon House.

In another coup, one of Queensland’s best chefs, Noma alumnus Ben Devlin, crossed the border to take the helm of Halcyon’s restaurant, Paper Daisy. Named after the wildflowers that grow on the headland, it has become an ideal stage for Devlin’s “confident coastal cooking in a relaxed environment”. With a menu that balances summery Australian classics with innovative dishes – a prawn roll with avocado, mayonnaise and iceberg sits comfortably alongside paperbark-grilled cod with white onion and seaweed – Paper Daisy looks certain to become a destination in itself. 

Guests arriving at Halcyon House are greeted not with a cold towel or glass of champagne but with an ice cream cart offering flavours made daily by Devlin, such as a tartly sweet passionfruit, or rich chocolate flecked with jewels of finger lime. It is a gesture emblematic of the experience of staying at the hotel, a relaxed confidence in the sophistication of simplicity and a deep commitment to nostalgia.

Source: Vogue Living, June 29^th 2015