Ace Hotel Sydney: More Than a Look

Ace Hotel Sydney has an unmistakable aesthetic. Industrial architecture, vintage furniture, record players and contemporary art shape a hospitality style that others have widely imitated. Yet the real appeal of Ace has never been quite so easy to reproduce. It lies in the atmosphere, the people and the sense that a hotel can become part of a city’s cultural life.

Set in Surry Hills, one of Sydney’s most culturally interesting neighbourhoods, the hotel gets this particularly right. The lobby is busy with conversations, music and people coming and going. Meanwhile, the restaurants and bars attract a local crowd, and the art is provocative, playful and unmistakably Australian. It’s a seriously cool hotel, but more importantly, it’s alive.

Ace Hotel Sydney and the History of Surry Hills

The building itself has quite a story. Ace occupies the historic Tyne Building on Wentworth Avenue, a former pharmaceutical warehouse. Its site also has associations with some of Australia’s earliest European pottery production. During the nineteenth century, convict potter Jonathan Leak established a pottery works in the area, producing bricks, tiles and domestic earthenware. Later came the warehouse, garment manufacturing and other uses, each adding another layer to the building’s history.

Surry Hills has undergone equally dramatic transformations. Once associated with industrial workshops, Chinese immigrant communities, razor gangs and illicit drinking, it subsequently became a centre for artists, alternative culture and LGBTQ activism. Today, galleries, independent businesses, restaurants and creative studios fill the neighbourhood. As a result, Ace feels entirely at home here.

Flack Studio’s Interiors at Ace Hotel Sydney

Australian architecture practice Bates Smart retained the historic building’s brick exterior and incorporated it into a new 18-storey development. Melbourne-based Flack Studio, founded by interior designer David Flack, created the interiors. Remarkably, Ace Sydney was the studio’s first hotel project.

Flack approached the commission less as a conventional hotel than as a large shared house. In doing so, he brought the intimacy of residential design into hospitality. The lobby becomes a living room, the restaurant a communal kitchen and the sunken lounge somewhere to gather over drinks and music.

However, Ace’s identity goes beyond the physical spaces. A recognisable look matters less than a feeling that encourages guests and locals to come together. With this in mind, Flack wanted something distinctly Australian, rooted in the diversity, creative energy and slightly renegade history of Surry Hills.

That thinking runs through the interiors. Original brickwork meets board-formed concrete, timber, terrazzo and marble. Meanwhile, richly textured leather seating, vintage furniture and custom pieces bring warmth to the industrial architecture. The palette draws on Australia’s landscape: ochre, rust, burnt orange, earthy greens and unexpected touches of purple.

References range from the work of Indigenous painter Albert Namatjira to the relaxed domestic interiors of 1970s Australia. Consequently, the result is eclectic but remarkably coherent, simultaneously nostalgic and contemporary.

Guest Rooms at Ace Hotel Sydney

The guest rooms continue the approach, mixing custom timber joinery, tactile wall finishes and terracotta bathroom tiles with beautifully chosen furniture. Moreover, record players and vinyl reinforce Ace’s longstanding relationship with music. The furnishings have the relaxed, collected quality of a private apartment rather than a standard hotel room.

Australian Art at Ace Hotel Sydney

Art is integral to the architecture, rather than something introduced once the decorating is complete. Flack Studio assembled an extraordinary collection of contemporary Australian work, commissioning much of it specifically for the hotel. Artists including Tony Albert, Nadia Hernández, Julia Gutman, James Lemon, Jason Phu and Glenn Barkley give the interiors an emphatically local cultural identity.

At reception, James Lemon’s wonderfully unruly installation of coloured glazed bricks references the site’s ceramic history. Nearby, an ochre-red marble staircase rises towards the first-floor event spaces alongside Julia Gutman’s monumental textile work Once More, with Feeling.

Gutman created the work from clothing, sheets and blankets previously worn and used by the artist and her friends. In effect, she transforms deeply personal material into a work of extraordinary scale. There is something particularly affecting about these intimate fragments of people’s lives occupying a public architectural space.

Similarly, Glenn Barkley’s Wall Vase for Jonathan Leak makes a direct connection with the site’s history in LOAM, the ground-floor restaurant. The large terracotta composition incorporates a dense collection of ceramic forms and motifs that evoke archaeological fragments. Thus, it recalls the pottery once produced on this land, giving the relationship between past and present physical form.

Artist Residencies and Everyday Encounters

The hotel’s commitment to art extends beyond its permanent collection. Australian artist Jason Phu was the first person officially to sleep at Ace Sydney. Before its opening, he took up residence to create work throughout the property. Furthermore, artist residencies, exhibitions and cultural gatherings allow the creative programme to evolve rather than remain a static collection.

Downstairs, LOAM moves from breakfast into the rhythms of lunch and dinner, while the sunken lobby lounge operates as the hotel’s social heart. In addition, a separate entrance along Foy Lane leads to Good Chemistry, an airy café and coffee bar. Its large doors open directly onto the laneway. The name recalls the building’s association with pharmaceutical company Soul Pattinson, another neat connection between its previous lives and its present one.

Kiln Dining: A Different View

Then there is Kiln, the spectacular restaurant and bar on the eighteenth floor of Ace Hotel Sydney. Fiona Lynch Office designed it separately, offering a different interpretation of Australian design. Its inspiration comes from the landscape’s colours and textures and the work of Italian-Australian architect Enrico Taglietti. Reclaimed timber, locally sourced stone and richly textured surfaces create an interior that is both sophisticated and wonderfully relaxed.

However, the restaurant’s most distinctive feature is its relationship with the city. Two terraces have retractable roofs, opening the spaces to the Sydney sky. Meanwhile, generous glazing frames an unexpected panorama of rooftops, railway lines and the urban fabric of Surry Hills. Rather than familiar postcard views of Sydney Harbour, Kiln offers a more intimate perspective on the city.

There is ingenuity in the details, too. Materials salvaged during construction became pigments used to hand-paint linen textiles for the restaurant. As a result, the history of the site becomes part of the design itself.

More Than a Look

Yet for all the architectural interest, art and exceptional attention to detail, Ace Sydney’s greatest achievement is its atmosphere. Music, food, contemporary art and an ongoing programme of events bring together hotel guests and the city’s creative community. Indeed, it never feels as though the hotel is simply performing coolness for its visitors.

That is the difference between a hotel with a distinctive aesthetic and one with a genuine cultural identity. Ace Hotel Sydney has both. The design gives it character, but the people give it life. And in a city as dynamic as Sydney, that’s what makes staying here feel like being part of something.

---

Discover the hotel’s official website.

Food photography: Nikki To. Kiln photography: Anson Smart.

Explore more travel stories from IRK Magazine.