GroupGSA delivered Sydney’s first Moxy Hotel, by Marriott International, at Sydney Airport.
The 301-key lifestyle hotel, opened in September 2023, designed as a fun and energetic touch-down, targets the young and young ‘at heart’ professional traveler.
The $140 million development was delivered by Sydney-based construction company Roberts Co, appointed by the project joint venture owners, RF Corval and Thai-based KS Hotels & Resorts.
Roberts Pizzarotti, now Roberts Co., engaged us to lead the architecture, executive interior design delivery, landscaping graphics and wayfinding for the project in 2018, when Marriott struck a deal with RF Corval and KS Hotels & Resorts to launch and operate its Moxy brand on the former carpark site. Roberts Co. reports 36 percent of their project team were females, including 50 percent of the team’s engineers.
GroupGSA Director Lisa-Maree Carrigan said the result is a dynamic alternative to the typical hotel experience, and one that sets a new design benchmark in the Moxy crown.
“Moxy Sydney Airport is so strongly different in its façade than anything done before it,” Carrigan said. “It marks a new wave in lifestyle hotels in Australia of consolidated hotel footprints with highly designed and well-equipped amenities, designed explicitly for a younger, and young at heart, professional clientele.”
Topping 13-storeys on Baxter Rd at Mascot, Moxy Sydney Airport is located directly alongside from the domestic and international terminals.
The hotel’s interior and exterior finishes speak explicitly to Sydney, fusing the iconic Moxy brand DNA with the granularity and history of the Botany area.
Rooms are compact, highly resolved, and encourage guests to engage in the social spaces.
“There’s a striking contrast between the compact, private rooms and buzzy social spaces, which operate day-to-night,” Carrigan said. “It’s smart, stylish and fun with very different materiality you’d expect to find at a typical airport hotel.”
Artist Elliott Routledge, who goes by the street name ‘Numskull’, was commissioned by the architects to develop a large totem-style sculpture and two major public artworks. This includes a kaleidoscope deep blue and white pattern wrap to the façade, which makes a strong playful expression and urban statement – and one that drives the overall personality of the hotel.
Inside, the landscape seeps into the foyer space, blurring the edge between internal and external. There’s a very deliberate, heavy greening to the communal areas, which are flooded with natural light. Moxy’s bold and playful attitude is met by edgy, industrial-chic social spaces, which include 24/7 dining options, a gym and flexible co-working and meeting breakouts.
A coffee outlet with an operable ‘garage’ style glass door opens out onto the street, offering cool warehouse vibes.
“The hotel design is outward-focused, so people in the area can grab a coffee from the hole in the wall without entering the hotel,” Carrigan says.
“There’s not another Moxy like Sydney in the world, and that’s really exciting,” Carrigan said.
18 March 2024: Stay at This Australian Airport Hotel Full of Moxy ’Tude.
…Wrapping around the steel-frame glass-box entry, the brick facade of the 13-story building, by Group GSA, was painted by local artist Elliott Routledge n the bold blue and orange colors of cargo containers. Farther in is the Little Baxter café, the bar, and the lounge, where sprawling seating meet an assemblage of custom rugs, each a different neo-deco pattern, pieced together on-site into a single carpet. Tucked at the rear, behind the lobby stairs, is the art house, a flex space and gallery where paintings hang from wall-mounted white-metal scaffolding in a sort of souped-up urban spin on the Victorian picture rail. If atmosphere is the charged space between things, here it’s the ping-pong betwixt vintage objects, regional art, and custom pieces that creates a reassuring homeyness. “Nothing feels unapproachable,” van der Pas says. Pollock agrees: “There’s a subtle intuitiveness to every space.” Resimercial, we’d say, in the current parlance…
22 August 2023: Australia’s first Moxy Hotel opens in Sydney
Marriott operates 140 Moxy Hotels world-wide, in Europe, North America and Asia. The hotel provider has announced more Moxy hotels in the pipeline for Sydney (Surry Hills), Melbourne, Perth, Auckland and Queenstown.
Lisa-Maree, a Director and multi-award-winning architect, is a design and thought leader with a global perspective. Her extensive industry knowledge from working in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Australia underpins her purposeful, visionary design excellence.