The hotels that are gone by April
Six buildings in this guide are cut from frozen water, and every one of them is scheduled to disappear. What that does to the way they get designed.
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Six notes about the buildings in this guide and the rules we use to decide what belongs in it.
The lead note for August 2026.
A treasury is not a floor plan
Nineteenth-century government offices have tall windows in the wrong places and corridors that go where clerks went. Converting one into a hotel means keeping the argument.
Why the capsule section has two entries
Australia has very few capsule hotels, and hostels are not the same format. A note on why we would rather run a short list than a padded one.
What Expo 67 left behind
A world's fair pavilion is built to move a crowd through in twenty minutes. Turning one into a hotel meant stacking an evening inside a building designed for a queue.
One state, one hotel
The art section is capped at six for a reason. A short account of the rule, the hotels it kept out, and the arguments we had about South Australia.
Reading a hotel from the outside
We describe hotels from public sources rather than from stays. Here is what that method can see clearly, and the things it will never be able to tell you.