Transitional Spaces

There’s a hotel in the centre of Sydney which to me feels like the lobby of heaven itself. It was designed from the structure of the old General Post Office Building. And the grainy, honey sandstone, integrated shards of the walls are now intersticed with metal, and pierced with glass.

I haven’t seen it since 2019, but I still dream of it. I remember when it first opened, it reminded me of Venice. The glass roofs with the sun pouring through, the marble tiles, the staircases and internal bridges.

The restaurant, with its sheer, voluptuous green glass platters, served the most wonderful array of breakfasts that you could sit at for hours. Yoghurts and butters in tubs of ice, carafes of fresh fruit juices, all kinds and textures and forms of breads, individual omelette chefs, eggs available in all ways, jams and honeys of all kinds in small glass jars, Chinese congee in bowls with ladles, Scandinavian meats and pates, French pastries, coffee of all varieties, berries blue and red and purple.

At dusk, the lamps were lit, with the glass magically turning soft and radiant instead of hard and sparkling as it was during the day. It was enchanting to know that the fairy lights were on in Hyde Park, just a few hundred metres away.

This hotel became a transitional place for me. I moved countries 8 years ago, shifting restlessly between polarities and hemispheres, a dual citizen. Friendships waned and crested, during those years. Belief systems altered, and biases were challenged, and eroded. Frayed endings were tied up, or cut away.

And I contemplated these disruptive events from an ensconced position, a place of solace, in the modern Tower section, with the old clock tower measuring the time above us all.

The hotel itself changed its name, acquired by a new franchise. Terror attacks and the pandemic intervened to prevent my regular returns.

But in the landscape of the mind, I trace the contours of this space, which held me safe while my worlds spun and transformed.

It made a difference to my optimism, that the jagged impact of human chaos and global uncertainty could be remedied with human excellence. The harsh scraping serratedness, that feeling of having one too few protective layers of skin, was soothed by the trademark Heavenly Bed, whose mattress was superbly woven, and had square cushions, and bolsters, as well as pillows. There was an option to not have your sheets changed the next morning, if you wanted to save the planet. The texture of the sheets was smooth, with the softness of T-shirts.

The danger was always to overdose on big screen TV, and oversleep, and miss breakfast, which would be such a loss. Whatever chaos and insanity was being wrought in the world outside the glorious ramparts of soaring glass and iron and sandstone, the act of breakfasting in a leisurely way, without any disturbance at all, with sun pouring down through glass, was its perfect antidote.