East End · Adelaide, South Australia
Fifty-five rooms in a bluestone bond store, one block from the parklands
Walls half a metre thick keep the heat out until about four in the afternoon. Iron columns run down the middle of every floor, the lap pool sits in what was the cart yard, and the casino floor is one flight up the iron stair.
The building
A bond store from the 1880s, still behaving like one
Goods came off the carts, went through the weighbridge and sat under bond in these rooms until the duty was paid. The stone is Adelaide bluestone, quarried south of the city, laid in courses you can still count from the lane. Nobody rendered over it, so the walls still hold the night air until mid afternoon and let it go again after dark.
The iron columns down the centre of each floor once carried the grain. They're still there, painted the same dull green, and they decide where the beds and tables go, which is why no two rooms match. Some have two windows and a deep reveal; others have a metre and a half of stone beside the bed.
- Rooms 55 across four floors, four types
- Built 1884, bonded warehouse until 1961
- Walls Bluestone, roughly 500 mm thick
- Courtyard Lap pool in the old cart yard
- Back door The loading door on Hessian Lane
- Parklands One block east, about four minutes
Rooms
Four types, named after what the building used to hold
Keystone has the corner, with windows on two walls and a stone sill wide enough to sit on. Hessian faces the lane and stays dark and cool, while Jarrah looks down into the courtyard and gets the sound of the pool in the morning. Up top, Longspan runs the length of the floor under the original roof trusses.
Every room has blockout curtains, a ceiling fan alongside the split system, and a kettle left out on the bench. Housekeeping comes daily unless you hang the card.
Eating and drinking
Weighbridge for dinner, Cellarman's for the rest of the night
Weighbridge is on the ground floor, where the scales were set into the slab. The kitchen cooks over coals and buys from the Adelaide Hills and the Fleurieu, so the menu changes every few weeks.
Cellarman's is behind the iron stair, with a lower ceiling, cooler air in summer and a long list of South Australian bottles by the glass. Out in the courtyard, the Pool Hut does coffee and cold drinks from first thing until the sun comes over the west wall.
First floor
Adelvale Casino, up the iron stair
Adelvale Casino is the casino floor of this hotel, inside the bond store on the first floor. You reach it by the iron stair out of the lobby or by the lift in the old loading bay, and it's part of the hotel, under the same roof as the rooms.
There are a few tables and a bar, open evenings, under the same stone ceiling as everything else. Guests must be eighteen or over, with photo ID checked at the door on every visit, and limits are set on the floor by the staff. The full page covers the route, the dress code and how to ask for a limit before you sit down.
Where you are
East End, one block from the parklands, forty minutes from the vines
Once the markets shut, the East End is the quiet end of the grid. Rundle Street is two minutes on foot and the Botanic Garden gate is four. The parklands start at the end of the block, and that's where people run before the heat arrives.
The Adelaide Hills begin about twenty five minutes up the freeway, and the Barossa is roughly an hour north. Reception keeps a printed list of who is open on which day, since that changes more often than the websites admit.