Everything Except One Chair: Inside Flack Studio’s Hannah St Hotel

INTERIORS · MELBOURNE

Reading time: 12 min

Every piece of furniture, lighting and hardware in Hannah St Hotel was drawn for the building. All 188 rooms of it, down to the wall hooks, with a single black desk chair as the only exception. That reads as extravagance until you look at the floor plan, and realise it is closer to a requirement.

---

Hannah St Hotel opened in late 2025 at 19 Walker Street, Southbank, and it is the first complete hotel by Flack Studio, the Melbourne practice David Flack founded in 2014. He spent three years on it and calls it a career highlight.

The headline everyone has reached for is the bespoke count: every item of furniture, fixture and equipment in the building is custom, apart from one black Modus swivel desk chair by Tecno. It is a genuinely unusual claim and the specification stands it up. But it is usually reported as a flourish, a sign of how far the budget went, and that is not quite what it is.

The building sits on a triangular block. Its rooms are angular, curved or pointed and almost never square, and no two floors repeat. Catalogue furniture is made for rectangles. Once the plan stopped producing right angles, drawing everything became less a luxury than the practical way to fill it.

What follows is the route through the building, because this is a hotel you read by walking it.

Arrival, and a lobby that starts dark

The entrance is on Walker Street, directly beneath the King’s Way overpass. Architect Callum Fraser of Fraser & Partners has described putting it there as an act of urban embrace rather than apology, and the ground floor is glazed hard so the interior is visible from the footpath before you reach the door.

What you see through that glass at night is a warm orange room with a neon line burning across the back of it. The transition from under a concrete flyover into that is the most effective thing the hotel does, and it happens before you have touched a handle. A lobby that does its work before the door is a rarer thing than it sounds, and Mandarin Oriental Downtown Dubai makes the same case from the base of a leaning tower.

Inside, the lobby is deliberately low and dark before it opens. Walls are Venetian plaster in a burnished brown. Columns are wrapped in black Vixel glass mosaic. The floor runs 200 by 200 terrazzo in a warm latte tone into slabs of Grand Constantine grey marble. Above it all is the room’s best decision: a gridded, coffered ceiling painted in Porter’s Paints Calm Green in high gloss, so it holds a low sheen and throws the warmth of the room back down without brightening it.

The reception desk is fluted aged brass with a Carrara top, and it sits on a kicker of black and white marble cut in alternating strips like piano keys. Behind it, a wall of aged brass studded in a regular grid of domed bosses, lit from a slot above so each stud casts a small shadow. On the desk, custom lamps with aged brass bases and linen shades.

The pieces Flack did not draw are worth naming because there are so few: a Digamma armchair by Ignazio Gardella for Santa & Cole, a nickel Fontana Arte Luminator floor lamp, a Reversível armchair by Martin Eisler for Tacchini in Kvadrat’s Divina Melange. Beside them sits Cheek to Cheek, 2025, a hand-painted stool by Scotty Bemelen carved from recycled Cyprus wood taken from a tree estimated at 150 years old.

And rising through the middle of the space, Justene Williams’ Mirror Sheila, 2024: a two and a half metre sculpture in closed cell foam, resin, fibreglass, glitter, Australian pennies, convex safety mirrors and spray putty, scarlet, standing at the top of the stair like a figurehead.

Why almost nothing here came out of a catalogue

The joinery is where the argument is clearest.

It is a tribute to Charlotte Perriand’s furniture of the 1920s, worked in polished stainless steel, aged brass mesh, caramel-toned timbers and Carrara marble. Flack has described the palette as French and Italian modernism of the 1920s with 1930s elegance, 1950s curves and 1980s blush layered over it, and has been direct about why no single decade dominates: they picked from each and layered them deliberately.

In a room that produces the following. Ceilings left as polished concrete, stepped into a curved soffit above the bed. Carpet in New Zealand wool, tufted, in blush. A slatted oak headboard with rounded corners, running the full width of the bed and continuing into the bedside cabinets. Bedside lights of Flack’s own design, derived from Stilnovo’s mid-century Italian lighting: a chartreuse shade on a brass articulating arm. A hardwired reading light in a Limoncello powder coat. A daybed under the window, a table with a tapered leg, an ottoman in Kvadrat Maharam.

Then the details nobody would notice individually and everybody notices in aggregate. The wall hooks are a trefoil of aged brass, three lobes and three screws, set against polished plaster. The skirtings were drawn. So were the pastry dishes and the doilies.

Bathrooms take the same approach into wetter materials: Narcariel ‘c’ marble, American Oak, Azul wall tile in deep teal, custom terrazzo by Australian Terrazzo, textured glass doors in aged brass frames, stepped Carrara basins that read as a piece of masonry rather than a vanity.

Set against all that, the Tecno swivel chair is almost a joke, and Flack Studio has treated it as one. It is the only object in 188 rooms that somebody else designed for somebody else’s building. Hotels that draw their own furniture are rare enough to be worth collecting, and Miramonti in Val Camonica did it by handing the work to the builder.

The corridor is the boldest room in the hotel

Most hotels treat the corridor as the part between the interesting parts. Hannah St treats it as a set piece, and it is the clearest evidence that this is an interior designed around movement.

The ceilings are painted red. Not a blush or a terracotta, a proper saturated red, running the full length of the floor above a green-grey wall, with burnished stainless wayfinding and illuminated room numbers in a serif on white panels. Flack traces the idea to Deco-era Tokyo and to Grand Central Station, and the effect is cinematic in the literal sense: you walk down a long, low, warm tunnel to your door. Melbourne has form for treating the ceiling as the main event, as Golden’s Warrior One studio showed when it took the carpet off the floor and put it overhead.

The lift lobbies change material entirely. Polished plaster in grey, deep blue carpet, recessed blue doors, an opal glass globe on the ceiling, and vertical strips of red neon set into the wall.

That neon is not decoration. It is part of These Infinite Beginnings, 2025, the site-specific poem Flack Studio commissioned from the Wiradjuri and Irish poet Jazz Money eighteen months before opening. Twenty-six lines are distributed across the whole building: neon in the Upper Ground lobby, brushed steel beads on mirror panels, a recording of Money reciting it in the lift, fragments along every guest-room corridor.

A core of nine lines can be read in both directions to give different meanings, and further lines can be rearranged. Because it is scattered by level and by corner, no two guests assemble the same poem, and a returning visitor who meets an unfamiliar line knows they have entered a part of the building they have not been in before. It is wayfinding that happens to be poetry, and it is the single smartest piece of experience design in the hotel.

Money is not a decorative signing. She won the David Unaipon Award in 2020 for how to make a basket; mark the dawn followed in 2024 and took the 2025 RAKA Award; her feature film WINHANGANHA, built entirely from archival material for the National Film and Sound Archive, premiered in 2023.

Rooms that refuse to repeat

There are eight room and suite types, from 21 to 58 square metres: Local, Traveller, Explorer, Skyline Corner Suite, Lookout Corner Suite, Terrace Room with Balcony, the Melbourne Suite and the Hannah Suite.

The triangular plan is felt most in the corners. The Lookout Corner Suites run to 45 square metres with roughly 270 degrees of view, and Flack has filled the point with a curved banquette in ruched terracotta velvet that follows the bay right round, a round pedestal table in its centre, and the Tecno chair pulled up to it. Above, the concrete ceiling is stepped into a curve that traces the window line. Curtains hang in two weights of gold and olive linen so the light comes through warm even when the sky over Southbank is grey.

The Skyline Corner Suites at 28 square metres do the same trick at smaller scale, the bed set against oak with the curved window wrapping past it. In the Explorer Room, a crimson banquette runs the length of the window instead. In the Traveller Room, it is pink, with an oak desk beside it.

The Hannah Suite at 58 square metres is the one that gets the freestanding bath, placed in the bedroom beside a curtained window with a Jo Duck photograph on the wall next to it. The Terrace Room with Balcony puts its bath in a niche lined floor to ceiling in black and white striped tile, curved so the stripes bend around the corner, with a rain shower running down the middle of it.

Throughout, the blush carpet does a lot of quiet work. It is warm enough to hold the oak and the brass together, and it stops the polished concrete ceilings reading as cold. Specification at that level is what makes a room worth returning to, which is the case HOSHINOYA Tokyo has been making for ten years.

Three lounges, three temperatures

The public rooms are not variations on one look. They are three different climates.

Bar Hannah is the darkest. The ceiling is the same Calm Green high gloss as the lobby. Joinery is black mild steel with glass shelving and peach mirror, and the bar front is hand-painted high-gloss Burnt Umber by Haymes. Columns are black Vixel mosaic, counters are black leathered antique brown granite and rouge marble, and a custom brass pendant in a stepped double-prism hangs over the bar like a hanging staircase. Bentwood stools, a custom cocktail table with a solid walnut edge and a Calcutta Viola inlay, a Featherstone Re chair by Grazia & Co.

The Carriage Lounge is the warmest and the most saturated: wall and ceiling both in Porter’s Paint Buckskin at high gloss, so the room glows. The floor is solid European herringbone by MAFI, and the Carriage tunnel that leads into it is encased in black mild steel with black leathered antique granite underfoot. In the middle is a checkerboard coffee table in stainless steel, surrounded by a custom sofa in Sahco, Reeno armchairs by Grazia & Co in Kvadrat, and a Thonet Banana chair in pale green leather. Paintings by Mia Boe and Kat Shapiro Wood hang on the long walls.

The Terrace Lounge is the cool one, and it is the room that most rewards a second look. The ceiling is left as raw concrete with services exposed, ductwork and all. Columns are wrapped in blue mosaic and topped with conical brass uplights. The furniture goes light: rattan armchairs, Pastilles chairs by Tacchini, Tembo armchairs by Feelgood, olive green stools, a Gubi 9602 lamp, a Dórica floor lamp by Santa & Cole, a custom coffee table in aged brass with a blue stainless edge, and custom petal rugs laid in overlapping lobes. On the wall, Hannah Gartside’s Pleasure, 2023. Beyond it the terrace opens onto red cushioned seating, planting and the skyline.

Going from Bar Hannah to the Terrace Lounge is a change of season, and it is done entirely with ceiling treatment and colour temperature.

Thirteen artists, and all of them women

The art programme was curated by Samantha Barrow, general manager of Flack Studio, with David Flack.

Alongside Williams, Money, Boe, Shapiro Wood, Duck and Gartside, it takes in Marion Abraham, whose Disobedience and Positive Thinking, 2023, an oil on linen at 182 by 198 centimetres, hangs in the lift lobby; Mikala Dwyer; Claudia Terstappen; Georgia Spain; Victoria Stolz; Georgia Morgan; and Isadora Vaughan.

Thirteen artists. Every one of them a woman. At this scale that is a curatorial position rather than a coincidence, and the hotel’s own material never says so.

The one part that is not an interior

It is worth stepping outside once, because the building the interiors sit in has a story that almost nobody tells.

The ten-storey podium is clad in 274 precast panels of aerated concrete, made offsite from a custom-engineered mould and designed to resemble bluestone. Fraser describes shaping the lower parts of the building to reference the site’s ancient geology. Aerated concrete is full of trapped voids, so the panels are genuinely pitted and cellular rather than printed with a texture, which is also what basalt is and for a related reason: gas caught in a material as it set.

The specific geology is this. Roughly where Queens Bridge now crosses, a ledge of basalt ran across the Birrarung. It marked the boundary between tidal and fresh water, it was a significant place for the traditional owners of the land and the bay, particularly for hunting and fishing, and because you could walk across it, it served as a natural rock bridge. Blasting began in 1883, and it was gone before Queens Bridge opened in 1890. Building the memory of what a site lost into its own fabric is a move The Londoner made too, using the same tiles as the Odeon cinema it replaced.

So the corner carries 274 panels cast to resemble the rock that was removed from it, with a Wiradjuri poem running up through the middle of the building above them. Hannah St Hotel acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong / Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation as the traditional custodians of the land it stands on.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The bespoke count is the fact that will travel, and it deserves to. But the more useful way to read Hannah St is that the geometry and the furniture are the same decision.

A triangular site produces rooms that are angular, curved and pointed. Rooms like that cannot be filled from a catalogue, so everything had to be drawn, and once everything is being drawn a studio can push the palette much further than a fitted-out rectangle would allow. That is how you end up with red corridor ceilings, a high-gloss green lobby soffit, a bathroom lined in curving black and white stripes, and a poem you finish assembling on your fourth visit.

The result is a hotel that is more interesting to move through than to photograph, which for a building this photogenic is quite a thing to manage.