From down-at-heel to downright delightful
Chippendale’s history of pig ladies and rat catchers, booze, crime and convict killers is celebrated at The Old Clare Hotel as a painstaking restoration reimagines two of Sydney’s heritage assets.
The Old Clare Hotel, which stitches together the heritage-listed Carlton United Brewery Administration Building and County Clare Pub, took home the S4B Studio Award for Best Heritage Development at the recent Property Council of Australia / Rider Levett Bucknall Innovation & Excellence Awards.
With rave views as “hip yet hospitable”, the boutique hotel is the brainchild of Singaporean-based hotelier Loh Lik Peng.
Resting on a parcel of land steeped in history, the buildings that make up The Old Clare Hotel have at one time or another housed a hay and corn merchant, a furniture dealer, a boot maker and restaurant. Part of the site has been a hotel since its earliest days as a convict colony.
Loh says the “real grittiness and energy of the area was exactly right for the type of hotel I love to do. We build them to be a part of the neighbourhood, and so have their own sense of place.”
Chippendale’s grit and grunge is the perfect foil for The Old Clare Hotel’s gorgeous architecture, which links the two heritage buildings with a sparkling four-storey glass atrium, engineered by Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects.
Tim Greer, design director at TZG Architects, describes the building as “unpredictable, with a bit of magic and a twist of fantasy”.
That magic is found in its adaptive reuse. The old poker-machine room is now the reception area, while the C.U.B. Suite, located in the former Carlton & United Breweries’ boardroom, retains its original timber panelling, parquetry floors, cornices and restored executive men’s washroom.
The cracks in the walls and chipped windowsills are celebrated as part of the hotel’s history.
“When you walk around the hotel, you get a sense that the building is dressing and undressing itself all at once. The building plays games with what a hotel should be, some parts are exquisite and other parts are raw,” Greer adds.
The 62 rooms and suites recall local landmarks and characters from the area’s down-at-heel days. The Mary O’Suite, for example, commemorates Pig Mary, who fed her swine on offal and offcuts found from the nearby slaughterhouses. Convict-killer William Chippendale is also remembered.
The construction works included the demolition and strip out of existing buildings, excavation, new service infrastructure, additions to the existing buildings and high-quality fitouts to the 62 hotel rooms, offices, back of house and common areas, rooftop pool and three restaurants.
As the project team peeled back the layers of the building, they found every type of construction imaginable: brickwork methods from the nineteenth century, black cinder concrete, hardwood, deep steel sections and light weight trusses.
The award judges were impressed with the way the reimagined hotel adds to the connectivity of the new Central Park precinct by reactivating the disused lane between the buildings.
Applauding the project team’s efforts, RLB’s Managing Director NSW, Matthew Harris calls the hotel a “spectacular new space” which “honours its heritage while bringing new economic opportunities to the area”.