Hotel Hotel, Canberra by Fender Katsalidis Architects & Suppose Design Office

Located in Nishi, a new mixed-use building in Canberra’s New Acton precinct, Hotel Hotel is the result of an intense collaboration between more than fifty designers, architects and artists. By directly engaging with the complex systems that shape successful cities, though, it transcends the already remarkable sum of its parts.

There are several ways for a visitor to enter Hotel Hotel, the latest addition to Canberra’s remarkably skimpy selection of boutique accommodation offerings. Those looking for a dramatic entry, though, would be best to take the stairs. Here, more than 2150 pieces of recycled timber whoosh up the walls, forming a carapace that somehow manages to be both rustic and baroque, high-tech and low-tech, simple and mind-achingly complex. It makes plodding up the stairs feel a little bit like a jump to hyperspace in the Millennium Falcon – just swap speed-distended strips of starlight for frozen battens of timber offcuts.

The staircase, designed by March Studio, is just one piece of many in the Hotel Hotel puzzle. More architects, designers and creative consultants have had their hand in this knotty concern than it is possible to list, a pluralism that extends to the project’s agenda, which touches on everything from sustainability to urbanism, arts patronage and community development to architecture and design.

The project’s real genius lies in its understanding of the big picture, though, rather than its finely grained decoration. Molonglo Group has always seen Hotel Hotel as part of an ecology. Sitting above the hotel, there are 220 private apartments, while the “lobby” also plays home to a suitably urbane cafe-bar and a number of retail tenancies (the lobby is really a kind of semi-public arcade). The presence of the hotel helps support this amenity – which the more permanent residents of the comparatively inexpensive apartments upstairs benefit from. Stroll back down March Studio’s staircase and you’ll find a cinema and a 6-Star Greenstar office building, which takes up half of Nishi’s footprint but also provides recycled water and other services to its neighbours. Step outside and you’ll be surrounded by the busy streetscapes, restaurants and businesses of a burgeoning new neighbourhood that brings much needed life to Canberra’s inner city.

“Unfortunately a lot of our models tend to be ones of ‘here’s my square,’ whether that’s a block of land or domain of work,” says Efkarpidis. “If you think about the world that way – ‘Everything outside of that box is someone else’s and I don’t [care]’ – it really undermines the capacity to make great places.”

The work of many skilled and accomplished hands, Hotel Hotel is filled with tiny pleasures and clever design. Thanks to Molonglo Group’s understanding of the complex systems that shape successful cities, though, it quite remarkably transcends the sum of its parts.