Hakfoort Group realises the promise of Lord Stanley Hotel

Albert Hakfoort, director of Hakfoort Group, is not afraid of investing in a pub that needs it. In fact, that’s often how he identifies venues that would make a good fit for the group’s portfolio – venues with a lot of upside if – and only if – you’re willing to put in the work.

That was very much the case with the Lord Stanley Hotel in East Brisbane, which Hakfoort Group acquired in September 2022. Not only was the inner-city location a boon, but the venue’s need of attention meant Hakfoort saw possibility where others might see a lot of work and expense.

“The state of disrepair was an opportunity for someone who was willing to spend the capital and, dare I say, make the Lord Stanley great again.

“Most of the acquisitions that I engage in are normally distressed assets, so they’re either in administration or very close to it. And as a result, the first thing we do is to look where the wasted money is and to fix or to plug those holes. If there’s enough holes in a profit and loss that we can plug, then we can set about directing it to what is essentially a normal standard for our trading operations within the group. We have a benchmark based on the ceiling and trading hours that we can get it to, and that’s where we set our goals.”

Moving the puzzle pieces

For each venue Hakfoort takes on analytical assessment of what a venue needs and what it doesn’t. No two venues are the same. At the Lord Stanley, Hakfoort identified that due to the demographics of the area, gaming was not a large revenue stream, and yet took up a lot of the venue’s floor space. There was also a disused standalone drive-through bottleshop at the rear of the venue, which the previous owners had used for storage. The first major change under Hakfoort’s renovation of the pub was to move the gaming room to the old bottleshop space.

“I’ve taken the gaming room out from where it was and put it into an area where, if you’re not interested in gaming, you’ll barely notice it’s there. It’s essentially encapsulated in its own little gaming space and the rest of the people that want to come to the venue for food and beverage can come there for that,” explains Hakfoort.

The space vacated by gaming also meant that the kitchen could be made larger, to focus on a better food offering. A lot of the redesign was also about opening up the venue – removing a lot of narrow corridors, opening up the dining space, and ensuring the public bar could service the majority of the venue. Upstairs, this also meant redesigning the function space to vastly expand its floor space.

“It was very impractical the way it was built. It had a bar that was essentially in the middle of a room. By the time you took your shelving, storage and the bar itself, it was halfway into the function room. We’ve removed it and relocated into a smaller footprint, but dare I say in a more functional manner, which has opened up this function room to probably about 100 more people than what it used to hold,” states Hakfoort.

The upstairs function space also benefits from newly built deck, giving partygoers views over two streetscapes.

Green space in the urban jungle

Hakfoort identified one more pertinent opportunity for the Lord Stanley’s redesign – significantly expanding the beer garden, while ensuring it’s all weather-proof.

“We used the two driveways, one in and one out, to expand the footprint of the beer garden. That’s now the focal point of the Lord Stanley – a really nice, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing beer garden that you could enjoy feeling like you’re outside, but be covered by a retractable roof,” states the director.

Not only does the beer garden use a whole lot of underutilised square meterage on the site, but it’s also giving the local area something that it’s been lacking in a pub offer.

“The competition in the area, they either don’t have beer gardens, or they’re small and impractical.”

Taking inspiration from operators like Comiskey Group and what they’ve done with their outdoor spaces, as well as The Grounds of Alexandria, Hakfoort wanted to create an idyllic green space to enjoy a meal and a beverage.

“I’d rather be surrounded by plants than steel, concrete and windows. So that’s why we put such a focus and expense into that, because it’s a place that I’d like to have a drink and I’d like to have a meal. It just feels good right in Brisbane to have a beer garden that takes advantage of the great weather.”

Hakfoort did the landscaping planning himself, with hundred of plants throughout the space, including a massive Canary Palm tree and a Pandanus tree – the latter of which had to be craned into the centre of the beer garden space. All up, the landscaping alone cost $700,000.

A proper pub offer

Having closed the Lord Stanley Hotel in May 2024, the renovation took just under twelve months to complete and cost a total of $15m. Speaking to Australian Hotelier just weeks after re-opening, Hakfoort said that the renovation of the pub spoke to what the locals in the area were after and what they had been missing – a traditional pub offer.

“We’ve purposely built facilities in this hotel that attract essentially the middle of the location that we’re in. We don’t want to set ourselves up to attract a nightclub crowd or the young crowd. And we also don’t want to put ourselves in the fine dining, very expensive bracket. We have intentionally put our pub menu back in there, similar to what we have in our other pub areas and venues, because the feedback that I have from people in this area was that they just want a good pub, and the Lord Stanley could be a good pub.

“We also put in a kid’s playground area, which gives the parents somewhere to go, because of my five closest competition venues, only one of them has a kids area.”

The neighbourhood has responded in droves to the new Lord Stanley Hotel. And of course, the most-talked about aspect is the beer garden, which Hakfoort says garners the same reaction by most people who see it for the first time.

“Wow.”