The hotel that came back

The best place to understand what is happening in St Kilda right now is five floors up, on the roof of 35 Fitzroy Street, at about seven in the evening. From there the city towers sit on one horizon and the bay on the other, and between them is a suburb that has spent forty years being written off and refusing to go.

We were shown around by Sophie Fenton, who looks after client relationships for the hotel, and who has the good sense to start a tour at the top.

Standing up there was quite extraordinary. The first thing that strikes you is the size of it — an exceptionally large space, and obviously still a work in progress. The outdoor bar that will service the area has not been built yet. What is there now is temporary, and the roof launches properly later this year.

The views do the rest. You look straight down Fitzroy Street and you really get the green canopy, with the city in the background, and then there is the ocean out the other way. It gives you a perspective on St Kilda you do not get anywhere else. On a warm evening it will be a fabulous place to spend a night.

What it is

Novotel St Kilda opened in September. It is eighty rooms and suites, a bar and restaurant called Urban Kitchen & Bar built around an internal garden atrium, a private dining room, a boardroom, a ballroom under 5.3-metre ceilings, and the rooftop, which takes a hundred and fifty people standing.

The rooms are worth a mention because somebody clearly thought about them. The palette is coastal rather than corporate, with local references worked in — it reads as a hotel that knows which suburb it is in, which is rarer than it should be.

The fit-out is modern and contemporary, with very clean lines, and the way they have used the colour palette is genuinely inviting — you feel it the moment you walk into the lobby. The restaurant and the bar space on the ground floor are superb.

What struck me as much is the conference facility. Three large screens, which makes it a real option for presenting to a large group, or for a breakfast meeting. The boardroom and the conference rooms are just as good, with curtain partitioning so the spaces can be opened up when you need the room.

The part that makes it a property story

Here is what most people walking past will not know.

There has been a Novotel in St Kilda before. It stood at 14–16 The Esplanade, and it had a long life under several names: the St Moritz hotel from 1991, the Novotel Bayside from 1993, the Novotel St Kilda from 1999. Before any of that the site was the St Moritz ice rink, and before that, back in 1923, the Wattle Path Dance Saloon.

It closed in 2019 and was demolished to make way for luxury apartments.

So the headline writes itself — a hotel knocked down for apartments, and the name returns seven years later a few hundred metres away. But the interesting part is how it returned. Not as a new building. The Novotel came back by taking over an existing hotel on Fitzroy Street and rebuilding it from the inside out.

A hotel site becomes apartments. An ageing hotel becomes a good one. Both forms of demand are real, and both are being met.

That is the whole St Kilda argument in one site. The suburb is dense, constrained and heritage-rich. It does not have much room left to build new things, so renewal here increasingly means taking something that already exists and making it worth caring about again.

And it is not happening alone

The hotel is one piece of a wider push on Fitzroy Street, where several developers have been working alongside the City of Port Phillip to lift the street as a whole rather than one address at a time. That is a more patient kind of development than most, and it is the sort of thing that only happens somewhere people believe in.

Why we are writing about a hotel

Because we have lived here a long time, and because the health of a suburb shows up in its hospitality before it shows up in its sale prices. Somebody with capital looked hard at Fitzroy Street and backed it. People who do that for a living are rarely sentimental.

So would I tell a developer that St Kilda is worth their time? Look at what is happening on one street. Luxury apartments going up in the middle of Fitzroy Street, opposite the old Gatwick. The Prince of Wales being redeveloped. The old Di Stasio becoming a new seafood restaurant. And now a hotel that chose to come back. Fitzroy Street is thriving, and St Kilda with it. It makes a fabulous suburb to consider for new development.

Photographs courtesy of Novotel St Kilda.

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