Design-led brand Ace Hotel is set to open its first property in Australia in May 2022.
Ace Hotel Sydney will open on Wentworth Avenue in the historic Tyne House brick factory in Surry Hills, the site of one of Australia’s first ceramic kilns.
The 264-room hotel will include a ground-floor restaurant, bar and café in the communal lobby area, and a restaurant and bar on the rooftop.
Design by Melbourne-based Flack Studio is inspired by the warm colour palette of the Australian landscape, and will feature organic materials. The design team have taken into account the neighbourhood’s rich history, which has included razor gang wars and underground liquor trade of the 1920s and 1930s, the modernist art boon of the 1960s, and the Gay Solidarity Group protests of the 1970s.
Features include textural straw walls in the hotel rooms and an ochre red off-form concrete staircase in the lobby. Many of the furnishings and artworks have also been created uniquely for the hotel, with guest room furniture, joinery and lighting custom designed by Flack Studio.
The hotel will announce the full details of its F&B concepts in the coming months, including an additional design partner for the rooftop restaurant and bar.
Brad Wilson, President of the Ace Hotel Group, commented:
“Though its culture and character are all its own, we’ve always felt a strong affinity with Australia — its intrepid optimism and renegade spirit resonates with Ace’s roots on the Pacific Coast of America. We love the country’s distinctive brand of modernism, particularly in the use of local organic materials, and were lucky enough to find a perfectly modernist partner in Flack Studio. David’s eye for color and space is completely singular — a dream design collaborator for our first hotel in Australia.”
David Flack, Founder and Director of Flack Studio, added:
“Surry Hills has been home to so many culturally important movements and people, and has always been a home for creatives and migrating cultures. We wanted to preserve the creative, slightly renegade energy of the space since its origins as one of Australia’s early brickworks. We were committed to creating a warm space that brought together Australia’s cultural history with Ace’s unique, community cultivating approach to hospitality.”
Ace was founded in Seattle in 1999 and now counts properties in Seattle, Portland, New York, Palm Springs, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Chicago, Kyoto and Brooklyn. Both the Sydney property and a Toronto hotel are due to open in early 2022.
But its only European property – Ace Hotel London Shoreditch – closed following the onset of Covid-19, and has since left the Ace Hotel portfolio, with plans to rebrand as One Hundred Shoreditch following refurbishment works.
