Port Adelaide Office Block Reborn as 100-Key Hotel
A brutalist 10-level office block built in 1979 will transform into a 100-room retro hotel under a $45-million project in an Adelaide precinct undergoing an upwardly mobile renaissance.
Construction is under way on the development at Port Adelaide.
Kite Projects managing director Damon Nagel said that when his company acquired the empty Marine and Harbours Building just before Covid hit, he knew the structure “had great bones”.
“The off-form board concrete is beautiful,” he told The Urban Developer while studying the striated exterior of the St Vincent Street property that has been vacant for 25 years but will be known as the MH Hotel when renovated.
“As you go through the building, there’s lots of different little quirky things; there’s a lot of original terracotta that’s around the windows.
“Within the [former] offices, we’ve taken cues from fabrics, from timber selections, from shapes of furniture ... and we’ve got [Adelaide-based] Enoki Design who have taken inspiration from that and modelled it into the furniture for the hotel rooms.”
The former office block will be retrofitted by Adelaide-based Build Inc.
“People in the area have a real affinity and a real love for the building,” Nagel said, standing beneath a giant mural that stretched almost the full height of the structure’s eastern wall and had a counterpart on the west.
“These two wonderwalls are landmarks now. We have to fit air-conditioning ducts and do some strapping for earthquake prevention, so they are going to get damaged.”
But he said Kite would contact the artists with a view to restoring the gargantuan 10-year-old artworks.
Nagel said a later stage of the hotel would likely include floating suites installed at a nearby dock on the river.
“We’ve got a water lease over the dock and the intention is to put in somewhere between 6 and 12, in essence like a houseboat but without a motor,” he said.
“I want people to feel engaged with the water.
“That’s the one thing the port probably lacks, because with the promenade you’re 3m above the water.”
Until recent years, Port Adelaide had experienced a steady exit of business and residential investment after the introduction of containerisation in the 1960s reduced available jobs for waterside workers.
But on the back of state and local government renewal efforts during the past decade, the historic neighbourhood has undergone a post-industrial renaissance.
“Where people were saying, ‘Oh, it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen’ [for Port Adelaide], I think those people have already missed the boat,” Nagel said.
“We’ve seen prices increase here greater than the average for Adelaide.”
Kite is also developing the nearby Dock One project, where the first homes of the 750 townhouses and apartments planned for the riverside site are completed and occupied.
“We’re seeing a totally different demographic moving into the area but also the development is massively supported by local people,” Nagel, who grew up in nearby Semaphore and who supports Port Adelaide in the AFL, said.
“When we did our research on who the buyers were [at Dock One], 65 per cent of them lived within 2km of this development.”
He said increased defence industry activity in the area in recent years had ushered in a new wave of activity.
“The port really had a lot of stop-start, stop-start, stop-start and I think now there’s that critical mass with the defence submarines and frigates, the amount of work that’s happening here has really given a focus,” he said.
“I think that’s done to Port Adelaide what the America’s Cup did to Fremantle.”
Nagel said that regardless of whether Adelaide-based manufacturing of nuclear submarines eventuated at nearby Osborne from drawnout negotiations between Australia and the US over the AUKUS defence pact, he was confident the port would progress as a property hotspot.
“People that I’ve spoken to within the defence industry have said there’s so much money being spent in defence that somebody’s going to be building something here,” he said.
The recent start of construction marks the third time Kite has attempted to launch the hotel project, with Covid initially proving problematic.
“Prices went up about 60 per cent and made the project unfeasible,” Nagel said.
“We then looked at where we could make some savings.
“We had a really large conferencing facility, so we took that out and converted it into more rooms; we went from 87 rooms to 100 rooms.”
In place of a formerly planned 350sq m conference room that had an extra 120sq m of spill-out space will be two smaller conference rooms of 80sq m on the building’s roof and 90sq m on the ground floor.
“I’m calling the rooftop conference facility the ‘cone of silence’,” Nagel said, alluding to the acoustic privacy inside and Get Smart, a retro Cold War espionage sitcom that featured Maxwell Smart, Agent 99, Chief and the evil Siegfried.
“If you’re in the defence industry and you want to hold a conference, what better place to hold it than in the cone of silence?”
The cone will incorporate the former harbour-master’s tower and offer opportunities for 360-degree port and city surveillance. Eventually, Kite plans to have the area adaptable to a less covert use, a rooftop bar that via bifold windows could be opened or closed to the elements.
Also meeting The Urban Developer onsite was Jack Macdonald, who had been with Kite for just five weeks and said the large project was a good one on which to cut his teeth with the company.
“There’s a good team behind the project,” he said.
“I like the foyer area.
“Having not seen inside before last week, I was very surprised at what I saw, and I think it will be a pretty amazing place to walk in and it will set the tone for the rest of the building.”
On departing the site, The Urban Developer spied a kite, of the avian variety, roosting on a ledge of the big Brutalist building. Nagel said he had sometimes noticed the diminutive birds-of-prey winging around the Kite Projects tower but had never seen one settle on the structure itself.
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