The Imperial Hotel: Sydney's iconic queer venue

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The Imperial Hotel Erskineville in Sydney is an iconic venue in the city’s gay nightlife and one of Australia’s most venerated LGBTQ+ safe havens.

The three-level luxury Sydney gay hotel has been described as a ‘palace of pleasure’. After closing down in 2015, the hotel underwent a major makeover and spruced up. As a cultural icon, it was the birthplace of the movie Priscilla and plays a pivotal role in the greater Sydney community as a historic theatre and event space.

The ground floor is made up of a 250-seat restaurant called Priscillas and has been conceived as a lost palace, a cabaret dreamscape of haphazardly replaced stone floor tiles and detailed timberwork. Various hand-forged steel-framed glasshouses and skylights throw shadows over broken brickwork, hand-laid masonry arches and bespoke tile patterns.

Sydney-based design practice Alexander & CO‘s renovation is both a celebration of its legacy and a reinvention of its personality.

The stylish Sydney gay hotel is illuminated by various repurposed lampshades and brass wall sconces. Carefully curated fringed pendants throw a shadow upon table settings whilst the main entry is notably illuminated by broke-down chandeliers. The space also features a private dining area with a large paper sculpture and open kitchen. The main bar features a bespoke cathedral-esque/Biblical fresco ceiling mural with the adjoining theatrical cocktail bar opening out onto a glazed enclosure to an inner courtyard and winter garden.

The project is careful to reimagine this cultural building icon into a place of fantasy whilst respectfully acknowledging its LGBQT+ custodians. This is a place to celebrate and rediscover, but also a place with significant legacy, grit, sometimes even heaviness.

Although the Sydney hotel feels immediately decorative, it is, in fact, a collection of robust building materials faced in makeup. Brickwork, concrete, steel, all represented in colour and high fidelity. Something in the metaphor of Priscillas restaurant is the ability for this rawness to never feel like a construction site, but instead a theatre of colour, a visual outrage.

The upper level pizzeria and bar is called Imperial UP and features an outdoor golden pizza oven, bar and an indoor cocktail bar, private dining room, lounge and seating. There is also a lower level nightclub and Australia’s first same-sex marriage Cathedral, which opened late 2019 on the rooftop.