For two months, I worked as a barista at Butler, a small cafe in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, tucked beneath the Williamsburg Bridge. Every few minutes, a train would make its way across the East River somewhere above us, accompanied by the usual soundtrack of traffic and the low rumble of a piece of infrastructure doing exactly what it was built to do. On paper, it wasn’t an especially romantic place for hospitality. There was concrete overhead, noise all around us and very little of the carefully controlled streetscape that tends to surround places trying to convince you to stay awhile. Yet I loved working there, and somehow the bridge became part of that appeal.
There’s a line in Tom Ford’s A Single Man that has stuck with me since I first heard it: “Sometimes awful things have their own kind of beauty.” An overpass is admittedly a fairly benign interpretation of awful, but I’ve always liked the sentiment. There are places where the instinct is to disguise the less conventionally beautiful parts of their surroundings, and others where those imperfections are allowed to become part of their character. Butler belonged firmly to the latter, and walking around Southbank on a recent trip to Melbourne, I found myself thinking about it again.
I was there to spend the night at Hannah St Hotel, a new hotel occupying the lower ten floors of the 65-storey Queensbridge Building, where Southbank starts to blur into South Melbourne. Kings Way sweeps past on an overpass almost immediately outside, while concrete columns, busy roads and the remnants of the area’s industrial character sit in fairly stark contrast to the increasingly polished towers around them. The Yarra and Melbourne’s Arts Precinct are a short walk in one direction, South Melbourne in the other. It’s an unusual pocket of the city, and not necessarily the kind of setting a hotel would traditionally choose to emphasise.
But what became interesting over the course of my stay was how little Hannah St seemed interested in escaping any of it. The building’s architects, Fraser & Partners, talk about authenticity, place and “material honesty”, and you can see that thinking before you’ve spent much time considering the architecture at all. Raw concrete remains visible alongside polished metal, timber and marble, while Flack Studio’s interiors soften the harder edges with deep colour, tactile fabrics and furniture that often feels closer to something collected for a home than specified for a hotel.
