Commercially the two middle floors were difficult to use and they added little to the overall standard of the premises. The design proposals relocated the restaurant to level 1, making it more easily accessible and visible from the street. The top floor was transformed into an open roof top garden, providing an exciting new space of distinct character. This unique and dynamic rooftop setting provides views of the surrounding city buildings, is bathed in midday sunlight in winter, and presents as a shaded, cool landscaped garden in summer.

The remaining floor between restaurant and the roof-top garden allowed for a multi-functional space available to both restaurant and the roof-top bar, thus providing flexibility to expand and accommodate additional demand from either of the two new distinct hotel areas. The design uses a pared back palette of materials and finishes which are robust and provide clarity and continuity between different levels of the building. A focus of the design was to augment and celebrate the character and fabric of the original building, this included stripping back original walls, exposing old beams and using them as a cost effective and authentic element of the new spaces.

The restaurant interior design aimed to provide an elegant city dining room with a clear, sophisticated identity. A linear wall of simple vertical white timber battens unifies a long tapering room and a line of sinuous black leather banquettes and black stone bar reinforce the unity of the space. Dark ceilings, integrated acoustic linings, concealed lighting, warm timber flooring and furniture were carefully coordinated to focus the attention on the intimacy of the dining experience while simultaneously providing the sense of being part of a sophisticated public room.

The rooftop garden bar is characterised by a large expanse of vertical green walling that was designed to provide a sense of a ‘secret’ ‘discovered’ rooftop garden. Existing windows in the surrounding external walls characterise the space as a unique outdoor ‘room’. The use of selective mirror wall cladding and splayed and angled polished stainless steel serve to fragment and expand the perception of what is essentially a very compact space. In a market where ‘distinctive’ is often achieved at the expense of authenticity, the integrity of this unique building has been retained and enhanced.

Each level appeals to a distinctly different clientele, and at the same time, clearly forms part of a vibrant new whole.