Among this traveller accommodation is the Sir Charles Hotham Hotel at 2 Spencer Street that boasted the largest bar in Victoria at one point. Now this corner of the CBD is undergoing redevelopment with new hotels set to be built to take advantage of the short walk to Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (MCEC) and Southbank restaurants and entertainment.
More recently serving as backpacker accommodation, the relatively low yield occupancy can no longer resist the pressure of Melbourne’s property market and the 112 year-old Hotham hotel, named after Victoria’s former governor, together with the Lord Clyde Hotel, circe 1867, next door, is to be developed into a 21-storey “post pandemic” hotel of at least 150 rooms.
The developer is billionaire Shesh Ghale, founder of the Melbourne Institute of Technology – not to be confused with Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, now RMIT University. Under plans his company lodged with the City of Melbourne, as part of the $48 million development the heritage façade of the hotels will be kept and the hotel tower will be set back on the 880m2 site.
Plans include a ground floor lobby, a food and beverage outlet, a courtyard and “hospitality spaces”, also allowing another floor higher up for “hospitality space”. The tower narrows as it rises with up to 17 hotel rooms on lower floors and nine or 10 rooms per floor at higher levels. In a move popular since the pandemic, the hotel will have a co-working hub.
While it’s on the corner of Flinders and Spencer Streets, it will face Flinders Street and probably have a Flinders Street address.
IHG’s Hotel Indigo was a recent addition to the precinct while across the road the former Victoria Railways headquarters was repurposed into The Grand Hotel managed by Accor. Around the corner, at 607-623 Collins Street, another hotel has been proposed as part of a 42-storey mixed-use tower.
Developer Sterling Global submitted plans for the tower incorporating residences and a 229-key hotel on the 1,970m2 site that houses the former State Savings Bank built in 1923, but is now operated as the Batman’s Hill on Collins Hotel.
Meanwhile, through his family company MIT Holdings, Ghale is the developer behind Australia’s first SO/ hotel at the northern end of Melbourne’s city grid, overlooking Flagstaff Gardens. It will have 288 rooms in a mixed-use tower between levels 11 and 34, including some with outdoor terraces.
