Melbourne's West Side story

The presses stopped rumbling more than a decade ago at 250 Spencer Street, long-time home of The Age, and a close runner behind the Gas and Fuel towers (razed for Federation Square) for the un-coveted title of Melbourne’s ugliest building.

Its utilitarian meanness won the squat brown building the sobriquet of the Spencer Street Soviet. Now the 1960s construction, razed following the move of Fairfax’s Melbourne operations to Media House on Collins Street in 2009, is to become one of the city’s growing number of exclusive residential towers, capped with the conspicuous glitz of the five-star hotel Ritz-Carlton.

Occupying the top 15 floors of West Side Place, it will be the highest hotel in Australia. The hotel’s 250 rooms will be topped with a 79th-floor skydeck and exclusive restaurant that will wave the fairy wand of glamour at the once benighted end of Melbourne’s CBD.

Crown’s super-tall Queensbridge Tower will eventually pip it for the title of Australia’s tallest hotel, says  project architect Shane Williams of Cottee Parker Architects. But the trend to note here is the mixed-use tower with both residential and hotel rooms, which is growing in popularity overseas and already seen here in Melbourne at the likes of the Whitehorse Towers Art Series Hotel in Box Hill and Southbank’s Shadow Play, which links nine floors of hotel rooms with more than 400 apartments. Tower three in the four-tower West Side Place will also boast a hotel, most likely the four-star Dorsett brand.

They make sense – the cost of building a stand-alone hotel is prohibitive, for starters – and the prestige factor is  key for developers looking to sell apartments in a well-supplied market. In the case of the gold-plated US brand Ritz-Carlton, the project marks its return to Australia after a 15-year absence. It is teaming up again with Far East Consortium in Perth with a mixed-use residential and hotel tower, and is jumping in with The Star casino in Sydney.

“It was a lengthy process convincing The Ritz-Carlton that 250 Spencer Street was a good location for a hotel,” Williams says. “But there are so many indications around the world, including Hong Kong where they’re in Kowloon and Singapore where they opened out in the middle of nowhere and it has now become a tourist centre, and they realised it could easily be the case for this site.”

Situating the hotel on top rather than ground level was another important factor inducing Ritz-Carlton to commit to the project. Check-in will be sky high, on the top floor, and a separate porte cochere, or covered entrance, will allow hotel guests to be dropped off at their own entrance and whisked via elevator to check-in on the top 79th floor where 360-degree views are unencumbered by other skyscrapers to the south and west. As Far East Consortium sales and marketing manager, Lauren Sheldon, points out, the Spencer Street railyards mean the views are at much less risk of being built out, a major concern for city apartment buyers.

More apartment dwellers like to imagine themselves as Eloise, the fictional girl who lived in a room “on the tippy-top floor” of New York’s Plaza Hotel. In Melbourne, a clutch of exclusive apartments attached to South Yarra’s Lyall Hotel will enjoy the benefits of the hotel’s services, while Shadow Play was marketed on the same basis. But unlike some of its other locations, Melbourne’s Ritz-Carlton will not have privately owned apartments that enjoy the hotel’s design and five-star services. “We toyed with  it for a while,” Williams says.  “But it was all too difficult in the end in terms of maintaining their own exclusivity.”

They are, however, expecting a mental symbiosis between the RC brand and the West Side Place residences.

“I think the prestige of The Ritz-Carlton will appeal to many of the buyers in tower one,” Williams says. “Particularly the Asian buyers will enjoy the idea of themselves being associated with a label of such  calibre.”

And there’s another benefit of the residential-hotel symbiosis. As the adage has it, guests – like fish – begin to go off after three days, so they can simply check in upstairs.

Inside word

When it came to designing a residential tower complex fit for an international five-star brand such as The Ritz-Carlton, architect Shane Williams, pictured,  of Cottee Parker Architects wanted to make it a win for the city’s rather unglamorous south-western corner rather than simply for the hotel’s well-heeled guests. His design for tower one of West Side Place features a porte cochere – or covered entrance – at which hotel guests are dropped off. He designed the tower around this central “spine”, as he calls it, a green, heavily landscaped space used by pedestrians as well as cars (a new laneway takes cars from south to north) and surrounded by retail activation. “It’s a central courtyard that’s more like a park – open to the public, a shared zone,” he says. “The size of the project – four towers on one site, 2600 apartments – all those statistics put it into a bracket of its own. Hopefully it becomes a destination precinct. I think this will become quite a vibrant area in the future, very different to what it has been. It’s a bold and courageous development that gives a lot back to the city.”

Crowning glory

West Side Place, 250 Spencer Street, Melbourne
$430,500-$1,763,000

Four towers ranging in height from 62 to 81 levels will eventually stand on the CBD’s south-west corner. Featuring the crowning glory of The Ritz-Carlton, tower one, being released on June 4, features 662 apartments starting at $430,500 for a one-bedroom of 54 square metres to $1,763,000 for a three-bedroom sky residence on level 60 with uninterrupted views. Car parks are an additional $85,000. There are 4000 square metres of resident amenities, a growing trend of high-end multiresidence apartments. Sales and marketing manager Lauren Sheldon says: “What Far East Consortium have recognised is that in order to sell apartments, the more amenities the better. If you really want the purchasers, you have to give something back.” Amenities include a 25-metre lap pool, gymnasium, karaoke lounge, simulated golf driving range, cinema and barbecue facilities on the two terraces with landscaping by Rush Wright. There are also sitting pods, a caterer’s kitchen and a members-only club lounge.

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