**Sustainability meets luxury: 1 Hotel Melbourne takes design inspiration from nature

SH Hotels and Resorts is putting a major focus on sustainability for the debut of 1 Hotel and Homes in Australia.

As part of Riverlee’s $550 million heritage project, Seafarers, in the CBD’s Northbank precinct, the lifestyle hotel will merge sustainability with luxury to meet the needs of the modern traveller.

“We find we have created a collective. Whether it’s hotel guests or like-minded companies that have the same core values, they seek us out,” said SH Hotels and Resorts Senior Vice President of Design, Tony Machado.

“Coming out of the pandemic, this real notion of wellness is front of mind and people are thinking about how we live, breathe and interact in all of our spaces and with the environment. The wellness component is something we’re really bringing forward, looking at everything from air quality in the rooms to operable windows and carving out spaces for wellness amenities.”

SH Hotels and Resorts’ sustainable initiatives include in-room water refill stations that are estimated to have saved 1.2 million plastic bottles in one property alone, and intelligent energy management systems that reduce consumption by an average of 17 per cent.

Taking inspiration from the restoration of heritage-protected Goods Shed No.5 as part of the project, 1 Hotel Melbourne will incorporate original wharf timbers, roof trusses, purlins and columns into the building’s interior design – led by One Design Office (ODO).

The interior design was also inspired by nature during a trip to regional Victoria.

“The Goods Shed is this amazing, cathedral-like heritage space that we have really drawn from because it has a very magical feeling inside,” Machado said.

“We then looked at the waterfront, and wanted to find out what was upstream and downstream of it too, to bring it all together.

“Walking through the Dandenong Ranges, with those incredible forests with gigantic ferns, it felt very prehistoric. The takeaway was the layering – the natural materials, the colour palettes – which tended to be very rich, and the exaggerated sense of scale, which is how we have applied the DNA of the brand to this specific location.”

Machado said SH is creating “a very unhotel hotel”.

“For that I’m very excited and I think it will be well received,” he said.

The Seafarers project is marked for completion in 2024.