Look up to see hospitality’s latest trend
To find a flourishing set of new hospitality businesses, forget the ground floor and instead head up to the roof. Right across Australia, rooftop bars, cafes and restaurants are the industry’s hottest trend.
Long a favourite setting in American cities like LA and Miami, rooftop venues were few and far between here until a few years ago.
The exception was Adelaide, which in the early 1990s started the trend with pioneering nightclubs featuring glass atrium covered lounge decks high above the Hindley St nightlife precinct.
Right across Australia, rooftop bars, cafes and restaurants are the industry’s hottest trend.
The real kicker for the rooftop trend, though, came when governments moved to ban indoor smoking in licensed venues. Tobacco companies countered by offering grants to popular venues to build outdoor areas for smokers to escape the ban – and CBD hotels discovered that a new generation of people loved the view upstairs.
The industry took note of the queues forming outside early roof-toppers like The Glenmore in Sydney and The Deck at Melbourne’s Waterfront Hotel and the up top trend was born.
Fast forward to 2014 and you can see what the new, successful formula looks like at venues like the newly opened Elixir in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley. While Adelaide’s early movers floated 20 stories above the city and were enclosed to protect patrons from high winds, today’s venues have much of the deck open to the night sky and separated into semi-intimate sections.
Signature look a key to success
As for styling, eclectic is definitely in. Sydney’s Darlo Bar glorifies in its quirkiness with astro-turf decks sporting lawn chairs and Chinese lanterns to attract an always interesting mix of patrons.
Visitors to the Carlton Hotel in Melbourne are confronted with a life sized ostrich and giraffe among the red velvet drapery before ascending to one of the three palm-fringed decks. At the nearby Madame Brussels, it’s the staff stealing the show, resplendent in their retro tennis uniforms as they shuffle Pimms out to the deck.
Fast forward to 2014 and you can see what the new, successful formula looks like.
The grungy, warehouse look is also popular, exemplified at the Mechanics’ Institute in Perth’s Northbridge with its exposed brick and scaffolding interiors and long plank tables for patrons to down house cocktails.
It’s not just the look setting today’s roof tops apart from the venues of old. Madame Brussels promotes itself as a ‘Rather Fancy Terrace and Public House’ named for a notorious 19th century brothel owner, while Elixir styles itself as an ode to the Moon Rabbit of Chinese tradition, ‘embodying the spirit of creation in its unique cocktails’.
Marketing matters in hospitality
What on earth, you ask? Well the answer, put simply, is that confronted with high rents and razor sharp competition, the experienced industry hands behind many of these businesses have decided to take their market positioning very, very seriously.
Crafting an exclusive look is designed to appeal to Gen Y fashion-conscious sensibility and sell as many high-priced cocktails, wagyu burgers and plates of spare ribs as you can.
Confronted with high rents and razor sharp competition, many businesses take their market positioning very, very seriously.
That is a world apart from the venues of the 1990s, whose mission was packing as many scotch and coke drinkers into a venue as possible. What may have worked then takes a heavy capital spend now and has proven as good at attracting risks as a profit.
That is why many industry stalwarts have turned to the rooftop retreat, with city views and lashings of flamboyant style, to attract big-spending, style-conscious patrons.
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