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Atura, Opera House Hotel, La Pigalle and other grungy hotel successes
Blacktown, in Sydney’s outer west, is a place to watch when it comes to hip, affordable accommodation.
Atura Blacktown opened last year and won the gong for Australia’s best mid-scale hotel at the Hotel Management Awards this month. It’s the most recent in a suite of achievements for this AHL property, which has siblings in Melbourne’s Dandenong and Albury on the NSW-Victoria border.
Amalgamated Holdings Limited, which also owns the Rydges and QT chains, plans “significant renovations” to Rydges Parramatta, also in western Sydney, a sprawling region soon to be boosted thanks to the planned development of a “cage-free” Sydney Zoo in parkland at Bungarribee, touted to open in 2017.
As city CBDs become densely packed, and sites hotly contested, hoteliers are thinking laterally, exploring alternative neighbourhoods, many of which were dismissed in the past as too grungy.
In Manhattan, British boutique company Firmdale Hotels opened its Crosby Street property in a cobblestoned SoHo quarter in 2010. This “urban village” approach is typical of owners Tim and Kit Kemp, whose London properties range across areas as diverse as Haymarket, Marylebone and South Kensington. When the Kemps opened Soho Hotel in London in 2004, it was the first deluxe property in that area. The greening of the East End, spurred by the 2012 London Olympics and associated investment in infrastructure, has prompted a flurry of chic little hotel openings.
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Such smallish hotels typically appeal to independent travellers seeking to discover newly cool precincts, most of which are fast filling with organic food stores, bistros, galleries, ateliers and shops selling goods well beyond the chain-store norm. Expect cocktail bars, hole-in-the-wall cafes and hipsters at every turn. Many properties feature local artwork, with key pieces for sale, fostering a sense of being part of the local scene. Lacking the marketing muscle of mainstream hotel groups, the push is to be individualistic and attract the type of guest who sees no cachet in staying at, say, a Sheraton or Four Seasons.
In the heart of New York’s South Bronx, Opera House Hotel has proved an exception to the real estate adage of location, location, location when it opened in 2013. This year, the New York press reported that the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, who was booked to stay there, was told by her cabbie not to venture to the borough. But the property, transformed from a 1913 opera house, is doing exceptionally well.
The city’s Lower East Side has had a rebirth, and its groovy hotels include The Bowery and The Ludlow, with US hotelier Ian Schrager due to open a property in this precinct next year.
In Paris, Design Hotels is set to open La Pigalle in the neighbourhood of Pigalle, on the southern slopes of Montmartre, which it describes as like “that troubled kid in high school who never quite found his place … tough and dangerous, he was also artistic and sensitive”. This quarter looks set to catch the attention of on-trend tourists.
In Bangkok, Hotel Indigo Wireless Road has opened in an area near Lumpini Park once famous as a radio station hub; its Hong Kong sibling is located in the once-seedy Wan Chai district.
But those who love guest loyalty points are likelier to look to the accommodation spin-offs developed by heavyweight chains. Indigo is part of the InterContinental family; Hyatt has an Andaz brand based on “unscripted style”, whatever that means; its new Tokyo property is hailed as the city’s hippest.
Marriott runs four Edition hotels, with nine in the pipeline, and Accor has fostered the arts-focused MGallery brand and elegant Sofitel So hotels, which come with designer credentials, including the Sofitel So Singapore collaboration with Karl Lagerfeld.
Source: The Australian, Susan Kurosawa, 11th September 2015
Originally published as: Atura, Opera House Hotel, La Pigalle and other grungy hotel successes
