Intercontinental Melbourne The Rialto

INTERCONT INENTAL MELBOURNE THE R I ALTO Rialto is located in a part of Melbourne that’s a bit like Wall Street – close to bank headquarters, consulting company headquarters, the big legal companies, the court district. So Monday to Thursday most of our customers are here for a business-related reason. During those days, we run at about 55 percent return guests who have business in Melbourne every week. We know all of our customers very well. We have one particular customer who we know so well that we know the order to hang up his shirts that he leaves behind. The Monday shirt, the Tuesday shirt, etc., so that’s our first hotel. “The second one is the weekend hotel and that’s a much more broad mix. Even people from Melbourne, itself, having a staycation. There are people from Brisbane and New Zealand and although we have international guests through the week, we tend to get more on the weekends because Melbourne is very event driven. Lots of festivals and things like the Melbourne Grand Prix (The Mercedes Formula 1 team stay here every year, we’re their lucky charm hotel.) And so our leisure business is more diverse.” BVO: What makes your hotel a preferred choice for business and leisure guests? Steube: “We are not a 50-storey brand new hotel with great big rooms and views forever and gold-plated taps. So we have to embrace the pride of our heritage as a 130-year-old building that has been converted into a hotel with all the features and the history retained. Originally, the function rooms were in plasterboard and beige paint and simple carpet. And we said, that’s not honest enough. So we stripped back to show the actual bricks and we put a very brightly patterned carpet in. The old bluestone laneway outside the rooms, which is the way that wagons used to get into the building to deliver, is the last private laneway in Melbourne and no one knows it’s there. So we had a professional graffiti company paint pictures on the wall. When you’re in the Laneway Rooms and look out, you see a Melbourne graffiti wall with a spotlight on it. inside under the atrium. Back in 1891, it was a very interesting building because structures in those days were not fireproof and they were built for one purpose. This was Melbourne’s first completely fireproof building and that was valuable because if you were storing things like your wheat harvest, or bales of your finest wool, you could be sure that no matter what happened in the rest of the city, your things would not burn up. It had elevators which went five storeys and could carry two tons; powered by water using hydraulic pumps. Remember, there was no electricity then. And the building was mixed use. It had residences, offices, stores, factories and entrepreneurial businesses in it – which was very unusual in those days.” BVO: Where do your guests hail from? Steube: “We have 253 rooms and 180 colleagues servicing the guests in the hotel. The bulk of our customers are Australians and you could almost say we’re running two hotels here. The first is our weekday hotel. InterContinental Melbourne The was filled from top to bottom with buildings like what you see when you look at the façade of this hotel. Hundreds of them. Unfortunately, during the 1970s when things weren’t valued for what they were historically, most of them were demolished. “This particular one was saved because it was part of a larger parcel of land and the buildings on it were kept in anticipation of something happening. The owners wished to build a very large office building next door and in return for the permit they were required to do something to retain this building. So, in 1983, they chose to join it up to the neighbouring building with an atrium-style glass ceiling and create what we have now. They no longer own this building but they are owners of the office building next door called the Rialto Tower, and there’s a very close relationship and interfaces between the two buildings and the two management teams. “The original Rialto building has the neo-gothic façade on the front that runs all the way down