Sydney’s new urban beach appeal

The Sebel Sydney Manly Beach Hotel enjoys an enviable waterfront location in the New South Wales capital, on the south side of the popular long sandy beach in the suburb of Manly to the north of the city.
The hotel is managed by the Accor Vacation Club, part of the French multinational hotel group Accor, and has been completely renovated by In Design International (IDI), a Melbourne-based interior design firm headed by founder and lead creative designer Penny del Castillo. The project marks the continuation of a longstanding collaboration between the practice and the client, whose portfolio of properties includes the Novotel and Mercure brands for which del Castillo has previously worked in Bali and Brisbane.
The new Sebel Sydney Manly Beach is a boutique hotel which reopened in 2019 following the complete upgrade of an outdated property originally built more than 35 years ago. In Design International’s meticulous project focused in particular on the interiors, transforming the property into Accor Vacation Club’s new flagship hotel in this region of Australia. With its redesigned, customised and entirely renovated interiors, the hotel now offers accommodation solutions ranging from single rooms to mini-apartments and suites complete with kitchenettes. IDI also redefined the identity of all the common areas, the ground floor sea view restaurant and the outdoor swimming pool, located to the rear of the property with respect to the entrance.
However, in addition to its renovated interior design, the new Sebel Sydney Manly Beach Hotel has also undergone a sustainability upgrade in compliance with the Accor group’s Planet 21 programme, which sets out important environmental goals for 2020 based on 4 key strategies. While promoting the active involvement of employees and customers in saving the planet’s resources, a further two key environmental challenges focus on food and the new and renovated building stock.
In accordance with the philosophy and recommendations of the Planet 21 programme, the designers were also extremely attentive to the choice of materials used to refresh the hotel’s outdated image. The new interior design makes extensive use of timber to give this sea-view city hotel a new and sophisticated urban beach appeal.
This natural and sustainable material has been made even more eco-friendly thanks to design choices that involve the use of 100% recycled products. Biowood, composed of wood and plastic, is used extensively on the walls and ceilings and to create elegant details, while the exterior areas feature ModWood decking produced from recycled plastic milk bottles and reclaimed pine wood dust.
Italian ceramic tiles produced by Ceramiche Piemme proved the perfect match for Accor’s eco-sustainable philosophy and also blend in well with the chic and sophisticated interior design elements, such as the original Tatoo Dezign carpets and the Phillip Jeffries wallpaper. 3D rectangular tiles created by designer Gordon Guillaumier take pride of place in the lobby, where they coordinate perfectly with the Biowood panelling, and were also chosen for the kitchenettes in the apartments and suites thanks to their pale ivory colour and the visual depth of their parallel groove relief surfaces (Bits&Pieces collection, Powder Bone Groove colour).