Melbourne’s Bourke Street Mall welcomes two new hotels on the one site

Spring in Melbourne has been heralded not only by blossoms but a new dual-concept hotel as part of the renaissance of Bourke Street Mall.

Hotel Indigo Melbourne Little Collins and the wallet-friendly Holiday Inn Melbourne Bourke Street Mall are housed side-by-side in the new Melbourne Walk precinct, with a covered shopping arcade on the ground floor and the two hotels above.

The dual-hotel concept is an Australia first for its parent, IHG Hotels, whose other brands include InterContinental, Crowne Plaza and Voco.

It has taken eight years to open the doors to the two hotels, part of a decade-long project for Australian architecture firm Buchan, which worked with a knotted site of eight buildings, some dating to the 1920s. Four facades still remain, including the 1930s Diamond House, the new builds dovetailing into the heritage facades to create the hotels’ exoskeleton and the city’s newest laneway.

Melbourne Walk is one more connector between Little Collins and Bourke streets, running parallel to Causeway Lane and Union Lane, with its new blockbuster resident, Mecca.

“We looked to the arcades such as the Block and the Royal Arcades, formed out of gold-rush money,” says Buchan’s Hayden Djakic, who started on the project in 2016. The site revealed plenty of its own secrets, he says, including a six-metre escalator from the 1940s, found buried in the basement of the 1920s Public Benefit Bootery building.

On a structural level, the hotel is split between the larger Holiday Inn, with 273 rooms, and the smaller, higher-end Indigo, with 179 rooms.

Dual-hotel properties offer plenty of synergies – here, executive chef Darryl Hand oversees a kitchen that serves both hotels, sending burgers through the green Holiday Inn door and gin-cured salmon through the blue Hotel Indigo door.

“But, of course, if an Indigo guest is craving a burger, we’re not going to say no,” says Hand, who moved from his long-running role at the Arts Centre Melbourne to the hotels.

Aside from kitchen teams, management and admin, the front-of-house staff – but not guests – move seamlessly through the “magic doors” that divide the adjacent hotels.

“You wouldn’t know there was another hotel next door,” says Scott Hamilton, general manager to both hotels.

While the concept may be IHG’s Australian first, it’s not new to Melburnians – the new hotels’ key rivals are singing from the same hymn sheet; the Pullman-Mercure team in Little Bourke Street and the Novotel-ibis team in Melbourne Central.

When asked if we should expect more dual-branded hotels, Djakic is emphatic. “Expect to see this trend continuing, 100 per cent, both here and overseas,” he says. “A 450-bed hotel is a huge amount of rooms to fill, but here, you don’t have all your eggs in one basket; you’re targeting very different demographics.”

The group is no stranger to this town; with the opening of the Crowne Plaza Melbourne Carlton later this year, they’ll have seven hotels in the Melbourne CBD alone, with another six around Victoria, including the luxury InterContinental in Sorrento.

Rooms start from $239 a night in the Holiday Inn and from $269 a night in Hotel Indigo.

See Hotelindigo.com/melbourne

Holidayinn.com/melbourne