Hotel review: Melbourne Marriott Docklands
Take a look inside the first new Marriott hotel built in Australia in 20 years.
It’s a glorious morning in Melbourne and traffic is flowing on the West Gate and Bolte Bridges. Trams are coming every few minutes down Docklands Drive, and the Geelong Flyer is heading out into a glassy Yarra where earlier a pair of rowing fours had been gliding. Meanwhile, the cranes are bobbing at Swanson and Appleton Docks.
This traffic and weather report is brought to you from Melbourne Marriott Hotel Docklands, in my eighth-floor room. Specifically, from the tub. I’m taking a bath in a Jeffrey Smart painting, and what other five-star hotel in Melbourne can provide that?
The hotel, which opened in late 2021, marks several milestones. It’s the first new Marriott built in Australia in 20 years, and it’s the first here to provide a dedicated M Club lounge for loyalty members. And you won’t find a 15th-floor infinity pool in any other Australian city. Significantly, it’s the first five-star hotel in Docklands. Many other brands have debuted at the western end of Melbourne’s CBD in the past year but none has ventured over the railway line into a precinct that’s playing the long game in convincing us about its virtues.
While corporate developments are slowly encircling Docklands’ landmark stadium, the Marriott sits in a mixed-use area on the northern side of its harbour, alongside other hotels, residential towers and a shopping mall but also cinemas, a brewery, ice-skating rink and film studios, plus the mothballed observation wheel. The building’s designers have taken cues from a more distant waterways heritage, producing a pair of conjoined glass-fronted sails as if filled with the breezes that are a feature down here. The snug lobby with its slick stone surfaces hosts a bar/coffee lounge, while the fine-dining restaurant and a grab-and-go cafe are down a short corridor.
The hotel’s 189 guest rooms (there are no suites) occupy the bottom half of each sail, with the pool, hi-tech gym and panoramic Sunset House bar sitting atop a further six residential floors. Our room, on the southwestern corner, is graded as premium and is a generous space with a large entry foyer hosting oodles of hanging space and storage, a small fridge (but no minibar) and good pod coffee machine. A king bed faces the large TV flanked by full-height windows, and there’s a small chaise longue from which to observe the bustle outside. The tones are white and shades of grey, and even the one artwork – a photo of rowers on the Yarra – is in moody black and white. The small touch-panel to control lights, room temperature and housekeeping alerts is blissfully simple to master. Ditto accessing the guest directory and menus on the TV. Our dress circle bathtub, only one of five in the hotel, sits by a full-height window in its own niche in a bathroom that has nice touches such as an extra towel and face-washer, the luxuriously padded gowns come in his-and-her sizes, and the vanity unit actually has space to lay out one’s personal lotions and potions.
In a lateral move, Marriott has placed food and beverage in the hands of venerable Melbourne catering firm Peter Rowland, which has handled its foray into the hotel sphere deftly. Ada’s, the cosy lobby bar, presents snacks and sharing plates alongside a well-curated wine list, featuring several Victorians, a few interstaters and some non-traditional internationals, such as a Vouvray (chenin blanc from France) and an Austrian gruner veltliner, as well as beers from Urban Alley next door. Sunset House on the 15th floor lives up to its name, being a large west-facing bar with a broader range of food and drinks, and it’s handy for the pool which, it’s pleasing to see, has an accessibility hoist.
The hero outlet is Archer’s, a tunnel-like dining space. It’s in the hands of Alex Drobysz, who’s cooked at Gordon Ramsay’s Maze in London, Michelin-starred establishments in New York and recent Melbourne favourite Epocha. We agree to the tasting menu, although that understates its impact. It’s five proper courses, each with masterfully matched wine. To start, we get mortadella cronuts served with a fruity bubble from the Yarra Valley, followed by goat curd with tiny fennel flower flavour bombs, balanced by a smooth Adelaide Hills sauvignon blanc. The barramundi fillet with truffle salad could have ended it, but along came perfectly pink pieces of wagyu beef (Yarra Valley pinot noir). We finish with something between a semi-freddo and cassata that’s so aromatic, releasing flavours of vanilla, lemon and mulberry, it needs every molecule of zing in the Tasmanian ice riesling. Across two mornings we try breakfast first as room service and then at Corsia cafe, and all offerings shine.
Over a two-day stay, while Docklands isn’t jumping, it’s got a buzz on the warmer second evening, maybe due to a drone show over the harbour brilliantly telling a Dreamtime story of the platypus. During the day we enjoy walking around the harbour’s edge with its whimsical street sculptures, before heading into the CBD (the hotel is within the free tram zone) to potter around the NGV and grab some Lunar New Year dumplings. We then wander back to Docklands, the excellent new book Adrift In Melbourne by Robyn Annear in hand. Chapter two describes a zig-zagging walk from Fed Square with eye-opening stories of the city’s past, finishing at what Annear calls the West Melbourne Swamp. This is over Spencer St where, before Batman staked out his village, there was a wetlands “teeming with waterfowl”. In time a call went up, that “the commercial and manufacturing … increase of our city demands that facilities be afforded for its extension in a westerly direction”. That was in 1872. A century and a half later, they’re starting to get the mix right.
In the know
Melbourne Marriott Hotel Docklands is at 15 Waterfront Way. From $250 for a Deluxe room. Premium upgrade is $40 a person and M Club upgrade is $120 single/$190 double.
marriottmelbournedocklands.com
Jeremy Bourke was a guest of Melbourne Marriott Hotel Docklands.