Touch, Taste, Theatre: What’s Driving Mondrian’s Success

The new benchmark for South-East Queensland hotels may have rooms that go for $10,000-plus a night on a Tuesday, but there’s another way the Mondrian is making serious revenue. The hotel component of the Vitale Property Group’s twin-tower development at Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast opened in June and includes a highly curated hospitality and events offering. Half the hotel’s revenue comes from food and beverage (F&amp;B), a commercial model that uses what has previously been seen as a side-hustle as a profit backbone. Vitale managing director Chris Vitale says as the hurdles of the construction phase of the project are left behind, the hotel is coming into its own and that they remain very hands-on in the process. “If you look at hotels all around the country, they lose money in their F&amp;B departments ... there’s probably only one hotel in Brisbane, who we all know, that does it really well,” Chris says. “If you want to make 6 or 7 per cent return on your money, give it to someone else, but if you want to triple that, you’ve got to take control. ▲ The LiTO restaurant that opens to footpath of First Avenue at Burleigh Heads. “Letitia [Vitale, managing partner] has the bookings for the day ... and she goes up and checks those rooms to make sure of our housekeeping. “I’m in the kitchen talking with the chefs, sales, marketing and IT.” So far the hotel occupancy is above the level the Vitales budgeted for, and bookings extend through to January, and F&amp;B along with events are boosting mid-week trade. Chris and Letitia Vitale joined founder of architect practice Fraser &amp; Partners Callum Fraser and Studio Carter founder Robbyn Carter for a candid chat about the project at Urbanity-25, The Urban Developer’s flagship conference on the Gold Coast last month. Chris detailed tough times for the Burleigh project, including selling out all of the apartments at pre-Covid prices followed by 135 days of wild weather that cost the development $250,000 a day and sparked big delays. ▲ The pool, bar and dining options at Mondrian Gold Coast. The managing partner says the project was pushed out by a year and went $70 million over budget. “It has not been an easy project but it looks great, the product is great [however] developing through that time was tough,” Chris says. “For the last three months of the loan we serviced the interest on the $305-million loan. “We had to roll our sleeves up and have some real serious talks about our balance sheet.” Now, the Mondrian Gold Coast has rapidly become the new go-to for hotels in the region, joining The Calile Hotel in Brisbane that opened in 2018 as the pinnacle of the sector in South-East Queensland. The Burleigh hotel comprises 208 rooms, including 132 studios, 76 suites, private beach houses on the ground floor and the exclusive “sky house”. ▲ The sky house on level 24 at Mondrian Gold Coast overlooks Burleigh Heads. There’s also an all-day-dining Italian restaurant, seafood restaurant, lobby bar and pool club plus a bio wellness spa and conference/event spaces. Letitia says they sold their houses to keep the project going but that they believed in it and the team they had assembled. “The vision was to create special moments, different moments in a lifestyle hotel in Australia that we’ve never experienced before,” Letitia says. “So, we feel that the F&amp;B is a part of the entirety to keep everyone on asset as well. “It was about really mastering that opportunity ... there were many research and development tricks which was quite fun. “We want you to come into a space, it’s comfortable, and we can keep you entertained and have the ability to do that.” ▲ The Urban Developer chief executive Adam Di Marco with Callum Fraser, Chris and Letitia Vitale, and Robbyn Carter at Urbanity-25 last month. From the outset, the Vitale Property Group team believied a hotel and residential tower would be more feasible than a hotel alone. “Hotels for developers don’t stack up—they are non-feasible, they generally have a zero development margin in them, so they’re hard to finance,” Chris says. “We had just come back from skiing with our family and staying at the Four Seasons which had an apartment tower next to the hotel. “That was our first exposure to branded residences where you can live it up in an apartment with all the amenities and services of a hotel.” Fraser and Partners founding partner Callum Fraser says that this type of development is a dream commission for architects. “It was measured it to the high bar of being in Burleigh, it’s a place that you can’t f*** up—national park, pristine environment and vanguard site—with a brief from a perfect client,” Fraser says. “We took the commercial bones of a hotel and turned it inside out to become a neighbourhood hotel.” ▲ Mondrian was designed to be a welcoming space that integrates with the neighbourhood at Burleigh. Fraser says the request from the developers he deeply took to heart was to give the building its eyes and ears. “It’s kind of a sensory approach to the hotel, which is different to what it looks like, but how it makes you feel,” Fraser says. “We started to embed ourselves in Gold Coast dreaming of the Indigenous people. “The creator spirit smashes down the coast, creating the shoreline and gets so drunk on honey he has to go for a swim to wash it off and then collapses and becomes the headland. “In every way, that is the perfect conceptual brief for a hotel in that location.” Fraser took on a group of young Gold Coast architects to team on the project to create more of an attraction for the area than a typical hotel-resi development. “The pre-function space for the ballrooms was the footpath, that’s where you would collect before a big event ... it’s a kind of radical idea,” he says. “It really brings the locals into play in so many ways, just being able to walk down the footpath when there’s a whole bunch of people and it’s busy. You have that energy. “People get drawn into the thing without needing to go and spend money. “To be part of that engine room in the local community, I think that’s the definition of success, right, “People just hanging around to see what’s going to happen next in that place, how it’s going to go—it’s thrilling.”

Touch, Taste, Theatre: What’s Driving Mondrian’s Success

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