COMO The Treasury

On the corner of Barrack Street and St Georges Terrace, the limestone and brick of the State Buildings mark the place from which colonial Western Australia was governed. COMO The Treasury occupies the upper floors of that group, which held the Treasury, the General Post Office and the Lands and Titles offices, and turned them into a hotel of 48 rooms when it opened in 2015.

History

The buildings went up in stages between 1874 and 1905. The earliest work was designed by Richard Roach Jewell, the colony's long-serving clerk of works, and the grander additions of the 1880s and 1890s came from George Temple-Poole, the architect who gave Perth much of its public building in the years of the gold rush, when money from the eastern goldfields paid for works across the city.

For most of the twentieth century the complex was the administrative heart of the state. Government departments moved out in the later decades and the buildings stood largely unused until the state government chose FJM Property, the developer led by Adrian Fini, to restore them. The restored State Buildings opened in 2015 as a precinct of restaurants, bars and shops, with COMO Hotels and Resorts, the group founded by Christina Ong, running the hotel.

Architecture and design

The restoration kept the façades, arcades, staircases and much of the original joinery, and removed later partitions to recover high ceilings and tall windows. The hotel interiors are by Kerry Hill Architects, the practice of the Perth-born architect Kerry Hill, whose resorts for Aman across Asia made his name. The palette is quiet: pale timber, oak floors, grey and cream fabrics. It leaves the nineteenth-century shell to carry the character of each room.

Rooms and suites

Because the 48 rooms were cut from former office floors, no two are quite the same in shape. Ceilings are high and the rooms are large by the standards of a city hotel, with deep window reveals over Cathedral Square, St Georges Terrace or towards the Swan River. Bathrooms are generous, in pale stone, and the furniture is low and spare so that the proportions of the old rooms read clearly.

Dining

Wildflower, the hotel's fine-dining restaurant, sits in a glass pavilion added on the roof, with views across the city. Its menu follows the six seasons of the Noongar calendar, the seasonal year of the Aboriginal people of the south-west, and it cooks with produce from Western Australian growers, fishers and farmers. On the ground floor, Post serves a brasserie menu in rooms of the former post office. The wider State Buildings precinct adds further restaurants and bars under the same roof.

Wellness

The hotel houses a COMO Shambhala Urban Escape, the group's city spa, with treatment rooms, a gym, a studio for yoga and Pilates, and a 20-metre indoor pool.

Weddings and events

The hotel hosts private dining and small events, and Wildflower can be reserved for private functions. The State Buildings as a whole are used for weddings and receptions, with the heritage interiors and Cathedral Square as a setting.

Location

The hotel stands at the centre of the city, opposite St George's Cathedral and beside Perth Town Hall, with Elizabeth Quay and the river a short walk to the south. Perth station and the shopping streets around the Hay Street and Murray Street malls lie a few blocks north, and Kings Park, the bushland park and botanic garden on Mount Eliza, is close by car or bus. Perth Airport is about 20 minutes away by road. For a luxury hotel in Perth, the combination of a protected colonial building, a small number of rooms and a kitchen that cooks by the Noongar calendar is unusual.