Park Hyatt Sydney, review: Encore on the harbour

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This was published 11 years ago

Park Hyatt Sydney, review: Encore on the harbour

The revamped Park Hyatt has maximised its greatest asset — its harbour view, writes Sarah Maguire.

New look ... a bedroom in the penthouse Sydney Suite.

New look ... a bedroom in the penthouse Sydney Suite.

There are some things about the Park Hyatt that remain the same after 11 months and $65 million worth of renovation, its serpentine shape and full-frontal harbour view being the most obvious.

Many staff remain, too, after the hotel gave them the option of office jobs rather than retrench them while it closed for business.

Leon, who shows me to my room, is one of them. His enthusiasm about his newly reopened workplace is on show as he gives me a tour of my room, pointing out everything from the tea set and mini bar to the reconfigured bathroom and the cupboards, where I can hang my clothes up, he tells me, "to keep them neat".

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The hotel chucked everything else out (or at least sold it, with staff getting first dibs) and started again - the cutlery and crockery, the beds, towels and linen, the kitchenware and the furniture: all of it is new, as is the entire fourth floor, home to Sydney's largest penthouse.

From the two balconies of my second-floor, $1200-a-night Opera Deluxe room, the view of the Opera House is unimpeded, the soundtrack the hum of harbour ferries and distant construction work.

The rebuild has taken full advantage of the harbour frontage - a self-evident thing to do, it would seem, except for the failure of the Hyatt to do it the first time around, in 1990, when the hotel was built on the former water police site.

The artwork is a highlight of the new Hyatt.

"It was much more inward looking," says a spokeswoman for the hotel, Lara Dawson. "There was a lot of marble and big columns; it was a bit more clunky and heavy. Now it has unobstructed views and clean lines.

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"There always was the element of location but it was not being optimised. [The rebuild] was very much about opening up the hotel to the views."

This means the balconies, for instance, are of glass rather than view-impeding terracotta-coloured balustrades, and window coverings are no longer curtains but automatic blinds that retract to leave windows unadorned, save for the sparkling blue view.

The remodelled exterior of the Park Hyatt.

The remodelled exterior of the Park Hyatt.

Sitting down to lunch in The Dining Room, the floor-to-ceiling windows have been folded open, bringing the harbour virtually inside - from a window seat you can hear the water lapping against a heritage sandstone slipway; lean across and you can see it. The reconstructed boardwalk and its stream of jogging Sydney office workers and promenading tourists are just beyond.

The outlook is almost upstaged when the southern bluefin tuna collar is placed on the table; usually an offcut, the collar has been turned into a signature dish by tuna-loving executive chef Andrew McKee. It is more T-bone steak than fish fillet and spans the width of the dinner plate. The skin is crispy and the dark flesh, more meat-like and textured than regular tuna, hides in crevices all over the bone, having been cooked in soy, ginger and wasabi oil over a Japanese charcoal grill.

It's almost a shock of a dish, overbearing in appearance and unexpectedly rich in substance and flavour. The entree is a will-o'-the-wisp in comparison: potted Alaskan king crab with lemon creme fraiche, nasturtium leaves and finger lime beads that continue to burst sweetly in the mouth long after you're expecting it.

The Dining Room at the Park Hyatt.

The Dining Room at the Park Hyatt.

The tuna collar is $40 on the a la carte dinner menu. A three-course lunch in The Dining Room is $69, including a glass of sommelier-selected wine. For the quality of food and the setting, it's an eminently reasonable ask.

Any five-star hotel worth its rating has to throw in some prices that make well-pedicured toenails (in the hotel spa, $115 for women for a 45-minute pedicure, $110 for men) curl. A bowl of brand cereal in The Dining Room will cost you $10. A glass of Dom Perignon is $49; the 6½-hour Australian Awakening spa treatment is $1012 for a mani-pedi, massage and facial, a blow dry and lunch. The two-bedroom, 350-square-metre penthouse, the Sydney Suite, is $16,000 a night for a minimum two-night stay. The celebrities, aristocracy and assorted tycoons in this stratosphere can book two connecting suites as well, bringing the number of bedrooms to four and the price to $50,000 for two nights.

On the night I stay, there are still workers putting finishing touches to the entry areas to the suites but the Sydney Suite is nonetheless booked for two weeks by a "domestic guest who has been in the news lately".

Based on price, the 155-room Hyatt places its penthouse among the world's top 10 suites. The most expensive is the Royal Penthouse in Geneva's Hotel President Wilson, which for $65,000 a night has 12 bathrooms, a private lift and a 1680-square-metre terrace.

Second on the Hyatt-compiled list is the $48,000-a-night Royal Villa at the Grand Resort Lagonissi in Athens. At 1180 square metres it includes a heated pool, steam room, private beach, butler and chef.

Denizens of the Sydney Suite have a 24-hour live-in butler service and chefs will cook private meals in the suite kitchen, for an added cost. The adjoining rooftop pool - from which you feel you could almost reach out and touch the Harbour Bridge - is for the use of all guests, including children.

In a town obsessed with real estate, the hotel sitting on some of the best of it is charging a premium for the vista that gives Sydney its international swagger, including the opportunity to wake up in the only hotel bedroom in Sydney, Dawson says, with a view of both the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House.

Waking up to Utzon's sails is glee enough for me. Availing myself of the butler service available to all guests, even in the lowliest $795 a night City Harbour King rooms, I order a flat white and pre-breakfast croissant, which takes 25 minutes to arrive. I'm not sure about the difference between this and old-fashioned room service but you can apparently also send a butler out onto the mean streets in pursuit of your heart's desire.

As throughout the hotel, the Opera Deluxe room features Sydney photography by Robert Billington and prints by Julia Silvester that reproduce convict painter Joseph Lycett's settlement-era landscapes of Sydney.

The specially commissioned artwork, by these two and six other Australian artists, is a highlight of the new Hyatt, providing points of interest inside the hotel, where things have been kept clean-lined and understated so as to give the famous scenery its head.

The use of sandstone, panels of which have designs etched into them by carver G.W. Bot, and local timber - including detritus from the harbour fashioned into sculptures by Robert Bridgewater - are further reminders that this, despite the steadfastly neutral interiors, is very much a Sydney hotel.

The writer was a guest of the Park Hyatt Sydney.

Trip notes

Where 7 Hickson Road, The Rocks, (02) 9256 1234, sydney.park.hyatt.com.

How much From $795 to $16,000 across 12 types of rooms and suites.

Top marks An elegant homage to the ultimate Sydney view.

Black mark In a town gaga for coffee, the flat white delivered to my room wasn't up to standard.

Don't miss A treatment in the spa. Recommended: the native clay and oil massage, $230 for 90 minutes.

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