Sydney’s historic Department of Education building reopens as a landmark hotel
The Capella Sydney launches this week after a seven-year, £170mn renovation
In the plush living room of the new Capella Sydney hangs a large-scale reproduction of Francis Fowkes’ famous 1788 map of the British settlement at Sydney Cove. Captain Arthur Phillips’ First Fleet is seen anchored in the harbour, the ships’ pennants unfurling in a stylised breeze. Encampments, garden plots and farmland dot the coast. At the bottom is the governor’s mansion, demolished in 1846 and now the site of the Museum of Sydney in the central business district (CBD), right next door to the hotel.
Squares of resin are fixed to the main image, floating a few centimetres above it. In them are embedded fragments of 18th- and 19th-century porcelain and glass uncovered by archaeologists Aduring the renovation of what is now the hotel and was formerly the New South Wales Department of Education, completed in 1914.
As artworks go, it’s among the less important in the hotel’s impressive multimillion-dollar collection. But it’s an intriguing take on Sydney’s origin story, embellished to acknowledge layers of time and context — a fraught arcadia, long since supplanted by what is today one of the southern hemisphere’s most muscular and beautiful urban skylines.
The map is one of the first things guests checking in will see when the Capella has its official opening this week; a little historical-cultural orientation, presented along with a Forager’s Fizz, a welcome drink of eucalyptus olida infusion, watermelon and bush shrub. This sets the tone for a hotel that is meticulously conceived to be quintessentially of Sydney — which is interesting, given it flies the flag of a very Singaporean company.
Capella Hotel Group is a subsidiary of Pontiac Land, the property empire with more than $7bn in global assets under management, owned by the Kwee family, one of Singapore’s wealthiest. Since signing the 99-year lease in 2015 on the listed Edwardian-Baroque building (and the adjacent Lands Building), in what is now known as the Sandstone Precinct, Pontiac has spent more than A$300mn (£170mn).
According to Evan Kwee, Capella’s 46-year-old vice-chair, the project “presented an interesting opportunity to introduce a hospitality brand that embraces the history of the buildings and their place within Sydney’s cultural timeline”.
Capella is a hard brand to pigeonhole. Its seven hotels differ significantly in size (Capella Ubud, on Bali, has just 22 villas, while Sydney has 192 bedrooms) and design (which ranges from Bali’s jungle-camp fantasy to Sir Norman Foster’s rigorous Capella Singapore, on Sentosa Island). What they all trade in is conspicuous luxury, from polished service to no-expense-spared interiors and generous room dimensions.
The Sydney hotel’s rooms average 55 square metres and are full of wood, soft leather and linen upholstery, with large stone-and-glass bathrooms and swanky minibars with wine fridges and gleaming brass fittings.
They are the work of Melbourne-based BAR Studio, which counts several Rosewood hotels among its numerous hospitality projects, and Simone Haag, a Melbourne-based residential designer. It is all unassailably polished, without being anodyne (if also, in the rooms, without any particular originality or quirkiness).
This already sets the Capella on a good footing to be a Sydney-beating proposition, in a city with a curious dearth of standout hotels.
The big-name players clustered in the CBD and around Circular Quay — Four Seasons, Shangri-La and Langham among them — offer the conventional five-star trappings but lack the character or glamour that confer landmark status. The Park Hyatt, with its postcard Opera House views, comes as close as anything; but subtract that view and you have a hotel that, while definitely comfortable, isn’t otherwise distinctive.
Newer boutique propositions, such as Ace Sydney and the Paramount House hotel, both in Surry Hills, bring commendable style, though casual ambience. Capella enlisted Make Architects to incorporate a new structure into the existing building, which had been unoccupied for long stretches of the previous 25 years. Lead architect Michelle Evans worked closely with the Heritage Council of NSW to ensure everything was achieved within preservation guidelines.
“The challenge was stitching together the [new] structure with the original,” she says. “We went through each floor, to determine what was exceptional heritage, what was intrusive . . . it was a huge forensic investigation.”
The addition, clad in a matt aluminium alloy, elevates the hotel from seven storeys to 11 (though, as a result of the superstition common in East Asia, you won’t find a fourth floor). The original building holds rooms, suites and an understated spa.
The sixth-floor indoor pool is a showpiece, 20 metres long in a space flooded with light. In the ground-floor all-day restaurant, Aperture, where a seven-metre green wall is planted with nearly 70 species of local flora, sunlight pours down through the sleek new glass atrium, framing a square of sky 11 storeys above.
I had the hotel’s “traditional” afternoon tea here, which featured spicy spanner-crab sandwiches, a wattleseed-infused eclair and bite-sized lamingtons with rosella jam. This theme — familiar canons, enlivened with only-in-Oz ingredients — permeates the food offering throughout: dinner at Brasserie 1930, the fine-dining venue, was beautifully plated and delicious, from the Merimbula rock-oyster opener to the black-fig tart finale, via local burrata with bush tomatoes and a whole duck roasted with meltingly tart plums.
Art is factored prominently into most Pontiac Land projects; the Kwees are noted collectors. Sydney, with its rich, freighted First Nations history — a topic lately very front and centre in the Australian discourse — all but required art to be part of the storytelling remit. Kwee wanted a collection “that encompassed all the narratives that exist within Sydney’s past and present”.
The main hotel entrance on Farrer Place still has its original russet marble walls and brass vitrines that once housed office directories but now feature works by First Australian multimedia artist Judy Watson — poetic abstractions of Fowkes’ map, overlaid with line drawings of native plants.
To the left is the clubby McRae Bar, named after George McRae, the building’s architect (it will probably be a hit with the suited-and-RM Williams-booted cohort that populates the surrounding banking and government office towers). Its leather banquettes and dim lighting contrast with striking neon murals by Otis Hope Carey, a 34-year-old, very of-the-moment artist (and a two-time champion at the Australian Indigenous Surfing Titles event).
Kwee brought in Talenia Gajardo, founder of Singapore-based advisers The Artling, to create most of the 1,500 piece-strong collection (it was she who tapped Carey for those murals). Sculpture, prints, photography, textiles, paintings — all are by contemporary Australian, among them many First Nations, artists. “We had never really looked at Australian indigenous art on our [predominantly south-east Asian-focused] platform,” Gajardo says. “So this project really opened the eyes of everyone on the team to this whole different genre of creativity and history and expression, which wasn’t really even on the [international] radar five or six years ago.” While guests might enjoy spending time admiring the art inside the building, the hotel offers a team of staff (loftily called Culturists) to help them plan activities beyond it.
“There’s a lot more to this city than [Harbour] Bridge climbs and the Opera House,” quipped no-nonsense general manager Mark von Arnim, who was previously at the Park Hyatt. He has given his team free rein to partner with chefs, curators, naturalists, foragers, distillers — the gatekeepers of the city’s culture, from all its most interesting angles.
Having spent weeks at a time in Sydney, often reporting on its various attractions when I lived in Singapore, I constituted a slightly higher surprise-and-delight bar, which they seemed to relish meeting. Among their propositions were a chef-accompanied visit to the Carriageworks Saturday market for a deep dive into indigenous produce, and VIP tickets to the city’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade, with seats in the private Taylor Square viewing enclosure (an impressive get, this WorldPride year).
I opted to spend a dazzling bluebird Sunday exploring the northern reaches of Sydney Harbour — not on the more expected motor yacht, but an impeccably restored 61ft classic sailboat, with whose owner the hotel has partnered. My Cicero was Max Burns-McRuvie, a guide-historian who is a real ace in the Capella’s pocket: charismatic, chill, deeply versed in his city’s past, with a penchant for amusing and slightly salty tales of its storied underbelly.
We cruised past Fort Denison (with an exposition from Burns-McRuvie on how it earned its original name, Pinchgut Island, back in penal-colony days) and the sleek new Sydney Modern wing of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, while a helicopter flying the Australian White Ensign traced broad circles above us (part of the Navy Week 2023 kick-off, Burns-McRuvie explained). Gunners Barracks, Chowder Bay, Middle Head: all places the average for-a-few-days visitor might never see, their backstories brought to fascinating life. We anchored off Reef Beach, a tiny sliver of sand facing Manly that’s accessible only by bush trail or boat, and were joined by a naturalist guide, who walked us into the thick brush of Dobroyd Head above.
After an hour of geeking out over banksia subspecies and water-dragon lizard encounters, we descended for a swim, then returned to the boat for a late lunch of spiced roast lamb shoulder, salads and a fine Adelaide Hills chardonnay, before sailing back to Circular Quay. It was as gloriously and uniquely Sydney a day as they come, and designed as such. The Capella’s fine art and finer interiors will doubtless make a mark here, where they have been needed, but if Sydney’s is the story it wants to tell, this is where they did it best.
Details Double rooms at the Capella Sydney (capellahotels.com) cost from A$750 per night. Maria Shollenbarger travelled as a guest of Scott Dunn (scottdunn.com), which offers a three-night stay at the Capella from £2,580 per person, including flights from London and Sydney airport transfers
