The Jackalope Group – the team behind Australia’s most acclaimed hotel opening in what feels like decades – has revealed plans to open a momentous sequel to Mornington’s Jackalope Hotel in Melbourne CBD.
March Studio – which was behind Australia’s other dramatic recent hotel opening, Canberra’s Hotel Hotel – has been selected for the dramatic follow-up to Jackalope Morning Peninsula. Early design concepts have been revealed to the media, which demonstrate the same commitment to abstract thinking as the first iteration of Jackalope.
Jackalope Flinders Lane will comprise 32 ‘luxury accommodation suites’ – 14 less than Jackalope Mornington Peninsula – within what is currently the historic Maria George building in Flinders Lane. The 1911-built tower will retain its five-storey redbrick façade, but will be embellished with an additional ten-storey box of frosted glass. This will in turn be topped with a visually arresting ‘Cloud Bar’, a cumulus-shaped rooftop space to be fashioned out of thin lengths of electropolished steel wire that will take on the colours of the sky from sunset to sunrise.
According to the designers, a number of references to weather phenomena will be incorporated as an artistic nod to Melbourne’s notoriously tempestuous skies.
As with Jackalope Group’s first hotel, art and design will be comprehensively integrated into the DNA of Jackalope Flinders Lane. For instance, instead of a cookie-cutter marble-and-steel foyer, guests will enter through a ground-floor forest, filled out with specially commissioned artworks and design installations.
Rounding out the building’s public and private spaces will be a café and two restaurants, to be spread across the four lower floors of the hotel.
Jackalope Flinders Lane is anticipated for completion in 2020.
