By Andrew Starke
The Strawberry Hills Hotel will tomorrow (Nov 16) morning reopen its doors after an 18 month renovation closed one of the inner cities largest pubs.
A six million dollar make-over has restored the classic Art Deco era hotel with a nod to its origins: leadlight windows, the twenties style pub tiles and the State Theatre carpet which leads patrons upstairs to the hotel’s bistro and decked garden.
The hotel’s general manager, Brenden Lawless, told TheShout that the refurbished hotel is ‘deliberately a classic pub, not a bar with an identity crisis’.
Publican Margaret Hargreaves has overseen the 18-month restoration completed by Sydney architects Humphrey & Edwards which has transformed one of the inner city’s largest pubs.
Paul Dunn of Nicholas Dunn and Associates was the original Strawberry Hills project architect from conception until December 9, 2009.
Hargreaves also owns the Shakespeare Hotel up the road from the Strawberry Hills.
Highlights are said to include “a mixture of 1920s glamour and modern ease, with a stunning second floor beer garden, an outrageously glitzy ‘original Vegas’ gaming room and an atrium of large glass windows for light and air flow”.
It is the hotel’s first major restoration since it was redesigned in 1921 by hotel architect, Sidney Warden.
The Strawberry Hills Hotel, which has a 24 hour licence, will operate a bistro from midday until at least 10pm, the beer garden remaining open until 1am, with seating on the hotel’s different floors for up to 300 people.
The ground features both a smoking and a non-smoking gaming room and the largest TAB in Surry Hills.
Jazz will return to the Strawberry Hills Hotel on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.