For the uninitiated, Australia can seem like some far-flung land of strange-looking creatures—many of them deadly—and people that speak like Crocodile Dundee. If that’s the starting point, then Tasmania, to the uninformed, may feel even more outlandish. The island has long had to wrestle with misconceptions. In the early days, when mainland Australia was a penal colony, the most hardened and irredeemable offenders were shipped across the Bass Strait to Tasmania. It’s a reputation the state has been quietly disproving ever since.
Those fortunate enough to visit soon discover that the reality could not be further from the myths. Tasmania is a place of staggering landscapes, world-class hiking, and MONA—one of the most extraordinary contemporary art museums on the planet. It is home to some of the finest cool-climate wine regions anywhere, and its capital, Hobart, is brimming with cosmopolitan culture.
It’s also a place that knows how to put its identity on unapologetic display. Nowhere is that more evident than at the MACq 01 Hotel—a project that proves a building can be both a statement and an invitation. Here, history meets architecture in a way that is as bold as it is clever, with exceptional dining, cutting-edge design, luxurious accommodations, and a spirited celebration of Tasmania’s layered past.
MACq 01 is one of those hotel projects that proves a building can be both an argument and an invitation. On Hobart’s working waterfront, where a 19th-century wharf shed once took in salted fish and jam tins, MACq 01 reimagines that industrious grammar as a modern shelter for story. The hotel opened in the late 2010s as a conversion of Macquarie Wharf Shed 1; its brief was paradoxically simple and stubbornly exacting: make a place that speaks of Tasmania without pretending the island is only a postcard. The result is architecture that reads like a contained harbour—weathered timber and pitched roofs—overlaid by interiors that are at once careful and theatrical.
Tasmania: a compact country with amplified character
Tasmania rewards focused attention. Since MONA’s arrival it has been tempting to reduce the island to single touchpoints—a radical private museum, a culinary moment—but the island’s appeal is cumulative: a fierce cool-climate wine culture that has produced some of Australia’s finest pinot noirs and traditional-method sparklings; a Saturday at Salamanca Market where sandstone warehouses become a curated show of makers; the raw uplift of kunanyi / Mount Wellington presiding over the city; and Battery Point’s layered colonial streets, which still read like a ledger of lives lived by the sea. These elements give Hobart texture: contemporary art and market stalls sit alongside weathered quays, and the conversation across those edges is what makes a stay interesting.
That compactness is a virtue. Distillers, winemakers and small-scale producers work within sight of one another, and that proximity—the short line from harvest to plate—creates a culinary confidence. It’s why visiting chefs base menus on the island’s ingredients and why seafood and cool-climate wines feel like honest conversation partners rather than an afterthought.
Hunter Street and the Macquarie Wharf precinct are practical and propulsive. From here the MONA ferry waits across the Derwent; Salamanca Place and its market are a short walk; Battery Point’s narrowed lanes and stepbacks are moments rather than distant detours. That proximity matters because Hobart is a city that rewards walking attention: the waterfront is active early and late, and the hotel sits where the harbour’s workday meets its spare time. For a guest who wants to experience the island’s producers, most good day trips—vineyards, oysters on Bruny, or a sail on the Derwent—are launched from here. MACq 01 sells that convenience honestly: it is a base for both immediate urban pleasures and the longer wilderness ambitions that make Tasmania distinct.
The MACq 01 : A chic hotel with a funny name
MACq 01 describes itself as Australia’s first “storytelling hotel,” a phrase that might sound gimmicky in lesser hands but here is rooted in literal practice: each of the hotel’s 114 rooms is assigned a Tasmanian character, and the public program—daily tours, gin tastings, curated talks—turns the building into a compact cultural itinerary. The site, the building and the programming are held together by a single editorial idea: place has a history and that history can be treated as an object of curiosity rather than polished nostalgia. The hotel’s own copy and compendium make this explicit; the 114-door conceit is not decoration so much as a way to orient a guest inside a larger story.
The development converted an old wharf shed into a four-storey hotel with a timber-clad exterior that references the shipping sheds of the harbour. The architecture—led by Circa Morris-Nunn with Robert Morris-Nunn as design architect and Pike Withers responsible for the interiors—was always conscious of provenance: the hotel reads as a contemporary warehouse grafted to Hobart’s maritime grain. It won professional recognition in the Tasmanian architecture awards, and its material honesty—the cypress cladding, timber boxes, generous balconies—keeps the building visually honest next to the older sandstone warehouses across the street.
Design: exterior restraint, interior storytelling
From the outside the hotel reads as a deliberate reference to its past: a pitched metal roof, plain elevations and timber cladding that weather to a salt-bleached grain. Up close the architecture reveals the translation—shipping-shed proportions made human, rhythmic balcony boxes that look carved rather than pasted on. Inside, Pike Withers’ interiors pivot between museum and comfortable domesticity. The lounge is the project’s moral centre: a circular, stonemason-crafted fireplace anchors the room and a lighting installation—an allusion to a kelp forest—crowns the hearth. Newspapers, artworks and Indigenous artefacts are curated into the public rooms with care; they are intended to provoke questions rather than provide tidy answers. The fireplace is not an affectation. It functions as a gathering device—an axis of quiet social exchange—and as a theatrical focal point that helps the hotel keep storytelling literal and communal.
The interiors favour local materials: Tasmanian timbers, woollen textiles and pieces from local makers are embedded into the fit-out. The effect is tactile and layered, not trend-led. That restraint is an argument: Tasmania’s character is not theatricality but accumulation—objects and habits that point back to place. The design makes that legible without sentimentalising it.
The lounge, the hearth and the guest profile
Walk into the lounge and the room’s social choreography is obvious. Seats are clustered so conversations can happen across different groups; the fireplace—a low, circular pit finished in stone—encourages small gatherings. Lighting evokes kelp and harbour shadows, and the walls are worked with clippings, maps and photographs that reward slow reading. The people one sees here are mixed: international travellers drawn by MONA and Tasmania’s culinary reputation, couples on a concentrated short break, and Australians exploring the island’s food and drink map. The hotel’s public spaces read like a small salon where a late afternoon gin tasting can segue into a conversation about local shipping history. Reviews and travel writing consistently single out the lounge and the social pull of that fireplace as one of the hotel’s defining experiences.
Rooms: character and scale
The hotel’s manifesto is literal in the rooms. Each of the 114 doors is effectively a small label: a name, an illustration, a set of objects curated to tell a life. Some rooms are spare and marine-framed; others are warmer, domestic, haunted by a single narrative. The design avoids theatrical pastiche; the characters are prompts for curiosity rather than museum dioramas.
The 114 Doors Tour—run by the hotel’s storytellers—turns a corridor into a narrative sequence, and the hotel encourages guests to treat their room as the beginning of a reading rather than a sealed, anonymous night. The rooms are generous in plan, with private balconies in many categories and large windows that frame either water or the city roofs. Practical comforts—well-considered minibars, comfortable bedding, modern bathrooms—sit alongside modest interpretive artefacts.
Bars, spirits and the argument for Tasmanian distilling
MACq 01’s bar programme is tightly integrated with the storytelling idea. “Gin Tales” pairs a sequence of locally distilled gins to narrative prompts that explain which part of Tasmania or which character inspired the spirit; the collection was distilled in collaboration with McHenry Distillery on the Tasman Peninsula and manufactured to reflect island botanicals and textures. The hotel calls this a local collaboration and hosts the tasting as a guided exercise—part tasting, part theatrical anecdote.
Evolve Spirits Bar: A Cabinet of Curiosities and Craft
Evolve Spirits Bar, at MACq 01 on Hobart’s working waterfront, is more than a place to drink—it’s a carefully curated celebration of Tasmanian and international spirits. The bar’s design is theatrical yet inviting, with timber-lined cabinets displaying an extraordinary private collection of fossils, from triceratops horns to a Russian cave bear, some dating back over 500 million years. The effect is a space that feels like part natural history museum, part intimate cocktail lounge.
Renowned for its meticulous curation, Evolve presents over 600 spirits, including rare Tasmanian single malts from Sullivan’s Cove and Heartwood, alongside collectible international whiskies. The bar’s Gin Tales program illustrates the provenance of Tasmanian gin, guiding guests through botanicals and production techniques rather than simply serving drinks.
Evolve has earned acclaim for both design and hospitality, winning Tasmania’s Best Bar and Australia’s Best Hotel Bar at the Australian Bar Awards in 2019. Patrons range from locals to collectors and travelers, drawn by the combination of storytelling, rare spirits, and the subtle drama of a space that invites discovery. The bar embodies MACq 01’s broader philosophy: celebrating Tasmania’s past while crafting experiences that feel entirely contemporary.
Dining at the precinct: Henry Jones, Landscape and art on your plate
MACq 01 sits beside the Henry Jones Art Hotel, and the two properties form a precinct that reads like a small gastronomic and cultural enclave. The Henry Jones is an art hotel built into the old IXL jam factory; its Landscape Restaurant & Grill is widely regarded as one of Hobart’s deliberately focused places to eat steak—cooked on a wood-fired Asado grill—surrounded by the hotel’s John Glover collection and other regional works. The effect is literal: you can be sitting beneath significant historic paintings while a prime Tasmanian cut is being finished over wood smoke. It is an instance of the island’s appetites—art and food framed together—done with a clear curatorial idea rather than with vague theatricality. If you want a single concrete example of Tasmanian culinary intention, Landscape (and the Henry Jones programme more broadly) supply it.
If you order a steak at Landscape expect a piece of meat treated with restraint: Tasmanian breeds, a pronounced char from the Asado grill, clean seasoning and a careful parade of sides that read the island’s produce. Critics and dining lists place Landscape consistently among Hobart’s top steakhouses; it is not celebratory theatre but precise, ingredient-forward cooking that respects provenance.
The tours: viewfinders, old town halls and a storyteller who cares
This is where MACq 01’s idea becomes literal practice. The hotel’s walking tours—Hidden Hobart, 114 Doors, and a series of seasonal grave-and-history walks—are run by an in-house team the hotel calls storytellers and by a Master Storyteller who acts as the cultural anchor for the programme. The tours use retro viewfinders at key waterfront points to show the layering of the city—how a pier looked 150 years ago, what the skyline used to be—and they move across Old Wharf, past the town hall and through small parks where municipal decisions and private tragedies left traces. These are walking tours with a curatorial eye and a sense of friendly provocation; they are not guided strolls for checklisting photos.
One name that recurs in reportage is Justin Johnstone—presented in some pieces as a Master Storyteller who leads guests through Hobart’s less obvious histories—and his example matters because he represents the programme’s tone: local, literate, impatient with easy sentiment and keen to make the visitor care. Reviews that follow his walks describe a guide who knows the town’s municipal oddities and can pivot between the macabre and the comic while remaining entirely anchored in place. Treat the tour as one of the hotel’s central experiences: it explains the city better than most guidebooks and, crucially, it does so with pride that is not simple boosterism.
A careful invitation
MACq 01 will not flatter you with easy glamour. It prefers to assert that Tasmania has always been complicated—indigenous histories, convict legacies, whaling, fisheries, a fiercely modern creative life—and that those things are worth encountering without a PR gloss. The hotel’s architecture, its curated spirits, the storyteller-led walks and the precinct restaurants are all gestures toward one conviction: that place, when attended to properly, is itself a rare kind of hospitality. If you want a hotel that will make Hobart legible and interesting in a single, imperfectly contained stay, MACq 01 will do that work.
