2019 Gallery

A small boutique hotel in Victoria’s Port Fairy, Drift House’s design impressed the jurors with its intimacy, its emphasis on pared-down, natural materials and its striking sense of place. Encompassing a double-storey Victorian bluestone house, an adjacent single-storey Edwardian home, and a newly built garden pavilion and reception centre, the project uses reclaimed wood and stone from a local quarry to create a subtle sense of luxury that also reflects the town’s hardscrabble history. Communal spaces are cleverly designed to be adaptable, transforming from dining room to lounge area to event space. These spaces invite a sense of home and comradery that’s rare in any hotel setting, encouraging guests to intermingle or retreat to the secluded privacy of their rooms as they see fit. This was one of the outstanding regional projects we saw this year, and we hope its marked ambition is a harbinger of things to come from Australia’s smaller communities.