GroupGSA has delivered Sydney’s first Moxy Hotel, by Marriott International, at Sydney Airport.
The 301-key lifestyle hotel, which opened in September, has been designed as a fun and energetic touch-down, targeting the “young at heart” and professional traveller.
The $140 million development was delivered by Sydney-based construction company Roberts Co, which was appointed by the project’s joint venture owners, RF Corval and Thai-based KS Hotels & Resorts.
GroupGSA was engaged by Roberts Pizzarotti, now Roberts & Co., 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.
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 professional clientele.”
Topping 13-storeys on Baxter Rd at Mascot, Moxy Sydney Airport is located directly alongside 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-focussed, 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.
Marriott operates 140 Moxy Hotels world-wide, in Europe, North America and Asia. The hotel provider recently announced four more Moxy hotels in the pipeline for Melbourne, Perth, Auckland and Queenstown.
