Share a hotel room with your favourite star at The Fantauzzo in Brisbane
Want to share your hotel room with Baz Luhrmann, Guy Pearce or Offspring star Asher Keddie? Well, you will be able to at The Fantauzzo, Brisbane’s $100 million Art Series hotel.
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Want to share your hotel room with Baz Luhrmann, Guy Pearce or Offspring star Asher Keddie?
Well, you will be able to at The Fantauzzo, Brisbane’s $100 million Art Series hotel, which opens in March.
Art Series Hotels has a string of properties styled on the work of famous Australian artists. They include The Blackman and The Olsen in Melbourne and we already have one, The Johnson, at Spring Hill, on the edge of Brisbane’s CBD, which is styled on the work of Michael Johnson.
Our new art hotel will feature popular portrait artist Vincent Fantauzzo, who is married to Keddie.
Fantauzzo, 40, was announced as the namesake artist for the stunning hotel on site yesterday. He was flanked by two of his most famous portraits, one of the late Heath Ledger, the other of his wife. The Keddie portrait won the Archibald People’s Choice Award in 2013. He has won that award four times.
Keddie was unable to be at the launch yesterday but Fantauzzo said she had been heavily involved in the project.
“We were up until 3am curating the rooms,” Fantauzzo said. “She’s amazing and so supportive and she is already marking dates on the calendar for us to come and stay here when the hotel opens.”
Fantauzzo’s photo-realist portraits and a series of landscapes will feature throughout the hotel and the artist hopes this turns people on to art.
“Some people feel intimidated by art galleries,” he said. “I want people to check into this great hotel and stumble upon the art.”
Signature art experiences at The Fantauzzo, which has been designed by Melbourne and Sydney-based architects SJB, will include art tours, in-room art channels and art libraries, branded smart cars and bicycles.
The Art Series Hotels group is owned by AccorHotels. The group’s CEO Pacific, Simon McGrath, described the art hotels as “not just a lifestyle brand but a cultural brand”.
Hotel developer and former Art Series Hotel owner Will Deague said the new Brisbane property, which has been carved into a cliff under the Story Bridge, would have some groundbreaking wellness elements.
The air in the rooms will be filtered four times an hour and shower heads will screen chemicals and deliver vitamin C as you shower.
There will be 166 guestrooms featuring around 500 of Fantauzzo’s works and there is also a “gigasuite”. It features four bedrooms, four bathrooms, four minibars and has views of the Brisbane River and the CBD.
THE GRINCH BEFORE THE GRINCH
Long before the Grinch, there was Ebenezer Scrooge.
In fact, there really couldn’t have been a Grinch without English author Charles Dickens’ famous Christmas grump, the central character of the classic 1843 novella A Christmas Carol.
It’s the ultimate Christmas story, a Gothic ghost tale on the one hand, and a redemptive story of love and how the human heart can change on the other.
Scrooge starts out as a mean, miserly old bugger who makes everyone’s life a misery but, after being visited by several ghosts one bleak Christmas Eve, he sees the error of his ways. He changes and, in doing so, changes Christmas for those around him in the process.
It’s wonderful that Brisbane’s shake and stir theatre co is doing an adaptation (co-artistic director Nelle Lee is doing the adapting) of A Christmas Carol, and that Eugene Gilfedder will play Scrooge when the play is staged in the Playhouse at QPAC from this Friday night.
It will also star Ross Balbuziente, Salliana Campbell, Arnijka Larcombe-Weate, Nelle Lee, Bryan Probets and Nick Skubij, and is directed by the masterful Michael Futcher.
The 60-year-old lead is one of our greatest actors, and Gilfedder told me he is relishing the opportunity.
He has played Scrooge twice before. “I wonder why they pick me?” he pondered when we met recently. “I must be really crabby.”
Gilfedder points out that Dickens was credited with reviving the tradition of celebrating Christmas in Victorian England.
There’s a movie about this, the 2017 biographical drama The Man Who Invented Christmas, which is the story of the writing of A Christmas Carol.
In it, Dickens interacts with the characters he is writing about, including Ebenezer Scrooge, played by the venerable Christopher Plummer.
All sorts of actors have played Scrooge over the years, including Jim Carrey, and there have been numerous film, television and theatrical adaptations. Heck, there was even The Muppet Christmas Carol.
You do need an actor with gravitas to play Scrooge, and I can’t think of anyone better than Gilfedder. As you can see, he easily manages to look the part.
The actor describes Scrooge asa “loveable, unpleasant bloke” and that gives him latitude to dig deep.
A Christmas Carol is a literary classic, and shake and stir has a track record for bringing literary classics to the stage, and we can’t wait to see what they do with this one.
A Christmas Carol, December 7-20, Playhouse, QPAC, $49 - $69, qpac.com.au
QUEENSLAND LANDSCAPE REVEALED
Queensland is an amazing state with some extraordinary landscapes.
Unfortunately city slickers don’t get to see enough of that landscape.
Not to worry, young award-winning Brisbane photographer Rory O’Chee (son of former Senator Bill O’Chee) has gone to one of our most remote and little-known corners to bring the landscape back to us in an exhibition entitled The Untouched Canyon.
O’Chee, 20, who is studying for an advanced diploma in photography at Southbank TAFE, spent time on a property in the Diamantina region in far western Queensland, a little visited area which has been seen by few and one that will be a revelation to many
Among the works which are now showing at Aspire Gallery in Paddington there are images of dramatic mesas, red stone bluffs, gibber plains and tortured trees which rival Arizona’s famed Monument Valley.
Gallery director Donagh Mengel says O’Chee is “a very exciting photographer who brings a unique and uncompromising perspective to landscape photography”.
O’Chee’s show is the culmination of two years’ work and involved traversing dirt mustering tracks and hiking cross country to reach hidden valleys and spectacular peaks.
O’Chee says the landscape is vast and impressive.
“I have tried to show this and to take people there through my photography,” he says. “I want people to look at these pictures and feel like they are there.”
The Untouched Canyon, until December 15, Aspire Gallery, 53 Kennedy Terrace, Paddington, aspiregallery.com.au
WILL WE BE MARTIANS?
There’s a lot of talk about Mars lately and a lot of talk about us going to Mars to survive. Which is why one of the signature events at next year’s World Science Festival Brisbane is entitled We Will Be Martians: Our Future of the Red Planet.
The festival will be hosted by Queensland Museum from March 20-24, 2019, and if you recall how popular it was this year, it’s probably best to book now.
And you can do that with early bird tickets released for a number of signature events, including the one about Mars, which is on in the Concert Hall at QPAC on March 24.
World Science Festival co-founder and superstar physicist Brian Greene will be the moderator and participants will include US chief scientist and NASA boffin Yvonne Cagle.
As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing next year, it’s a good time to think about our next giant leap ... to Mars.
There are a number of other events on sale now too.
The full program will be announced early in the new year. In the meantime, book early.
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