Grote Street Hotel

Melbourne developer Gurner has teamed up with self-storage owner Kennards to reimagine a 1.7-hectare former Australia Post site on the edge of Adelaide's CBD as a five-tower, $1.25 billion precinct. Its 220-room hotel would retain the site's original red-brick sorting building as a lobby beneath a new tower — one of the more ambitious adaptive-reuse hotel plans currently on the table in Australia. No operator has been named, and the masterplan's staged consent leaves the completion date open.

The place

The site sits at 237 Grote Street on the western edge of Adelaide's CBD grid, a block that has functioned as industrial and logistics real estate — first postal sorting, most recently self-storage — rather than as a hospitality address. Gurner's plan repositions the block as a mixed-use gateway between the CBD and the Adelaide Central Market precinct, betting that scale (five towers, a public plaza, over 15,000 square metres of retail and commercial space) can generate the pedestrian energy the location currently lacks.

The concept

The centerpiece of the site's history is the six-storey former Australia Post mail-sorting building, built for logistics rather than lodging and never previously operated as a hotel. Rather than demolish it, Gurner's design retains and restores its red-brick facade, repurposing the shell as the hotel's lobby and podium beneath a new tower rising above it. The hotel is one of five towers planned for the 1.7-hectare precinct, alongside roughly 600-750 apartments, a separate 19-level mixed-use tower housing Gurner's Saint Haven wellness club, and a purpose-built storage facility for Kennards. Planning consent from South Australia's State Commission Assessment Panel covers the whole precinct and permits staged construction over up to a decade, standard for a project this size, but it also means the hotel building's own timeline is not yet fixed. No hotel brand or operator has been announced for the 220-room component.

Dining & wellness

F&B and wellness specifics for the hotel itself have not been made public. The wider precinct is pitched around a five-star lifestyle positioning — extensive retail, an entertainment and recreation plaza, and a dedicated wellness centre in the neighbouring apartment tower — but nothing hotel-specific has been confirmed.