Checking into this hotel is a unique experience. Each room features a different design, with distinctive colours, textures, objects and even layouts, creating and evoking various moods – and you get to choose which one to stay in. Are you feeling playful today or quiet? Artistic or minimalist? Do you want to keep company with an expressionist artwork or would you rather luxuriate in a fake fur bed spread? Do you want to be enveloped by a sexy all-black room or transported to Africa?
The Collectionist Hotel in Camperdown, Sydney, is the brainchild of entrepreneurs Daniel Symonds and Toby Raphael. Symonds was inspired by a car hire process in the US that allowed him to inspect the various vehicles for hire first. At The Collectionist, this opportunity to select your own room yourself puts the guest in the driver’s seat (so to speak).
The earlier you check in, the more options there are, with open doors to rooms that are available and hangers on the door indicating the different categories you can choose from (determined by price). When you select your room, you let your friendly concierge know, and are welcome to enjoy a free drink from the bar on the ground floor – a small nook with distinctive stone walls and floors and a neon sign that says “I hope this looks good online”.
Not one but four design studios are responsible for the interiors of this hotel. When Andrew Cliffe from The World is Round originally pitched for the project, he realised the enormity of the task and split it up – each studio was to design 10 rooms each, making 40 rooms total, each one different and unique. The studios that joined him in the task are Yasmine Ghoniem and Katy Svalbe from Amber Road, Matt Sheargold and Susie Willis from Willis Sheargold, and Byron Bay-based team Lily Goodwin and Josh Cain of Pattern Studio.
While each team had its own approach, the results are not recognisable by studio – each team has utilised a range of different approaches and techniques to ensure that each room is distinctive.
Andrew Cliffe from The World is Round chose to bring in 10 artists – one for each room – to contribute artworks and sculptures. “I saw this as the perfect opportunity to work with local artists, both up-and-coming and established, whom I’d long admired,” says Cliffe. “With the collaboration concept in mind, I gave the artists creative freedom to express their vision within the parameter of a room.”
For Amber Road, their key to unlocking 10 distinctive designs was memory: “Our objective here was for each room to evoke a particular memory: a holiday, a dream, a person, an idea, an experience,” explains Yasmine Ghoniem. The carpets they selected were key to bringing this to life – a collaboration with local Studio Elke with Brintons featuring terrazzo, tribal and geometric patterns.
Willis Sheargold employed an Urban Luxe theme, using different timbers and carpets alongside Matt Sheargold’s own custom artworks to bring character to each space. Meanwhile, Pattern Studio took inspiration from stays with friends and relatives where the objects collected in a home give a sense of local colour and personality.
Overall, The Collectionist Hotel offers an unusual experience more in line with boutique and designer hotels in Europe than the usual Sydney offerings. All this has been achieved by putting the interior designers at the centre of the process, a strategy other hoteliers would do well to replicate.
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Thank you to The Collectionist for our overnight stay.