Review: Tayim restaurant at the Harbour Rocks Hotel

By Penny Craswell

On the ground floor of the Harbour Rocks Hotel, with dining overlooking busy pedestrian street Nurses Walk in Sydney’s The Rocks, is Tayim, a new restaurant, bar and deli with design by architecture studio Welsh & Major. The exterior brick facade has been restored and updated, while the interiors are a lesson in successful adaptive reuse, pairing historic sandstone walls with minimal design insertions to create a blank canvas for complex Middle Eastern flavours.

The kitchen at Tayim restaurant, Harbour Rocks Hotel by Welsh & Major. Photos: Tom Ferguson

The project was made all the more challenging by the heritage constraints to the site, which was previously the 1890s Evans’ Stores warehouse, as well as the considerable functional requirements of creating a working restaurant, bar and deli.

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Review: The Doss House Bar

By Penny Craswell

There’s nothing quite like a whiskey bar – it conjures images of smoky rooms, timber-lined walls, leather furniture, and of course, damn fine whiskey. Sydney’s The Doss House fits this criteria (apart from the smoky air, which is probably best) and adds some more.

A fireplace at a whiskey bar – The Doss House, designed by Buck & Simple. Photo: Tom Ferguson

Design studio Buck and Simple is responsible for the interiors, which reference the building’s past as an opium den, gambling house, bootmaker and boarding house dating back to the 1840s in the historic precinct of The Rocks. Read more

Review: Alleyway bar, Sydney

By Penny Craswell

Alleyway is a new micro whiskey bar tucked in a laneway behind 200 George Street in the centre of Sydney. Interior designers Angela Biddle and Shehani Kumarasinghege from Scott Carver had to make use of every millimetre in a tiny space with a width of only three metres.

Alleyway, with bottle shelving made of apple crates, interiors by Scott Carver. Photo: Luc Remond

Everywhere you look in this little spot, there is an interesting detail or pattern. Recycled Tea Grey timber was used for the bar front, contrasted with Bronze Verdigris metal finish for the bar serving ledge – this will patina with time. Read more