You’ll need a good base for the sights, culture and nightlife of Sydney, Australia’s commercial capital — and the chance to explore the rest of New South Wales too. Accommodation in the city doesn’t disappoint, whether you’re looking for luxury overlooking Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, or quirky options such as a former 19th-century quarantine station. Here’s our choice of the best places to stay in Sydney.
Main photo: Park Hyatt Sydney
1. Pier One Sydney Harbour, CBD
Best for a city centre location
For the essential Sydney experience — encapsulated in a luxury hotel suite — Pier One has serious waterfront wow-factor. Expect glimpses of Sydney Opera House from your balcony, and close-up views of Sydney Harbour Bridge from your bath. This pad is on a pier in the heritage-listed Walsh Bay Wharves Precinct, which has been reimagined as an arts hub, and with Circular Quay and the trendy Rocks district a stone’s throw away, you’ll have everything you need on your doorstep.
Spa N
Pool N
Price ££
2. Park Hyatt Sydney, CBD
Best for views
Location, location — oh my — what a location. Park Hyatt offers five-star luxury in what might be the most sought-after spot in Sydney, with its floor-to-ceiling windows providing jaw-dropping, direct views of the Opera House and Sydney Harbour.
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The property is just four floors high, and the year-round rooftop pool (it’s heated in winter) has the same striking views, with the span of the Sydney Harbour Bridge stretching so close overhead you’ll want to swap your front crawl for backstroke. With all mod cons, a sumptuous spa and a destination restaurant on site, the Park Hyatt represents the pinnacle of Sydney’s luxury hotels.
Spa Y
Pool Y
Price £££
3. Shangri-La Sydney, CBD
Best for luxury
The Shangri-La’s high-end high-rise differentiates itself from its local competitors with bird’s-eye views over Sydney Harbour, the Opera House and the CBD (central business district). All 564 modern suites and rooms have harbour views, with window seats you can sink into to take it all in. Deluxe Opera House City View Rooms overlook Sydney’s main attraction, while Deluxe Darling Harbour Rooms don’t face the Opera House, but offer unparalleled sunsets.
Look forward to top-notch service and an outstanding spa, but most of all the restaurant and bar on level 36; this is what makes the Shangri-La. Altitude and the Blu Bar pair destination drinking and dining with the best views in Sydney.
Spa Y
Pool Y
Price ££
4. Paramount House Hotel, Surry Hills
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Best for hipsters
All polished cement, potted plants and exposed brick, Paramount House is a hip place to stay. Set in the former Paramount Picture Studios building, this evolving warehouse space also has the Coffee Project (where you can mingle with Sydney’s creatives), Golden Age Cinema (showing classics and cult hits), and the airy rooftop Paramount Recreation Club, where you can take a yoga class (or get breakfast and a spa treatment).
It’s slap-bang in the super-cool Surry Hills suburb — celebrated for its fine drinking and dining — and you’re still only 20 minutes’ walk from Sydney Harbour.
Spa Y
Pool N
Price ££
paramounthousehotel.com
5. Ovolo Woolloomooloo, Woolloomooloo
Best for fun
Ovolo is arguably the most fun place in Sydney to bed down. Here, historical meets millennial, with funky spaces (think gumball machines, pool tables and 1980s-homage grid-tiled bathrooms) occupying the cavernous interior of the 100-year-old, heritage-listed Finger Wharf — reputedly the longest timber-piled wharf in the world.
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The hotel’s restaurant, Alibi, offers plant-based dining and is a destination in its own right, with a vegan menu that omnivores will appreciate. That said, there are plenty of restaurants around the wharf and in Woolloomooloo — plus your minibar is complimentary and restocked every day.
Spa N
Pool Y
Price £££
6. The Old Clare, Chippendale
Best for seeing Sydney like an insider
Beloved by locals, The Old Clare has taken two buildings in the once gritty, inner-city Chippendale neighbourhood — a locals’ boozer and an old brewery — and tastefully renovated them into one property, linked by a glass atrium.
Achieving a mix of modern minimalism and original bare-brick industrial charm, the bar is still bustling every evening, as many of its facilities are open to the public, which gives the whole place a lively atmosphere and makes guests feel like one of the locals. The three destination restaurants on site, your luxurious room and the heated rooftop pool have quite the opposite effect, as you holiday like a high roller.
Spa N
Pool Y
Price ££
7. Watsons Bay Boutique Hotel, Watsons Bay
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Best for seaside escapes
Watsons Bay — 30 minutes by ferry from Circular Quay — has been a decadent day-trip destination for Sydneysiders for years, with incredible views of the distant cityscape from the South Head of Sydney Harbour, and one of the city’s favourite strips of sand, Camp Cove.
This seafront property’s Cape Cod interiors maintain the yachties’ getaway aesthetic — all linens and wood panelling across its 31 capacious rooms — and the nautical, blue-and-white striped parasols of the Beach Club below are a picture of mid-century Monte Carlo.
Spa N
Pool N
Price ££
8. Adina Apartment Hotel Sydney Darling Harbour, CBD
Best for families
The perfect place for an affordable family escape, Adina eschews the overt opulence of the CBD’s luxury suites and instead presents a smart, chic home away from home. Each apartment has spacious lounges, with vast windows commanding views of downtown or — better still — Sydney’s newest tourist district, the glitzy Darling Harbour development.
Children are catered for with a complimentary kids’ pack and toy box and there’s a paid babysitting service. If dragging your little ones to a buffet breakfast each morning, or finding a restaurant after a long day of sightseeing doesn’t appeal, you can whip up a quick meal in your own fully equipped kitchen.
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Spa N
Pool Y
Price £
9. QT Bondi, Bondi Beach
Best for beaches
Cobalt seas, white sand, banana smoothies, golden tans, lurid surfboards and psychedelic camper vans — QT knows the kitsch images that Bondi Beach brings to mind, and has plastered them all over the entrance lobby of its boutique Bondi branch. Interiors offer colour pops, pastel furnishings and bleached wooden floors aimed at the kind of guests sporting sandy soles and acai bowls. They’ll even organise surfing lessons for you.
There’s no private pool or restaurant, but room facilities include kitchenettes and washing machines, and there’s a supermarket just downstairs. Oddly, you can’t actually see the sea from any of the rooms, but Bondi Beach is right outside your front door.
Spa N
Pool N
Price £££
10. Spicers Potts Point, Potts Point
Best for a home away from home
A row of three renovated Victorian terraces come together to form one 20-room boutique hotel in the celebrated dining and nightlife neighbourhood of Potts Point. Inside, the property is surprisingly sleek, light, bright and modern, although its three Victoria Terrace Suites feature period, marble fireplaces, hardwood floors and two sets of French doors that open on to your own balcony overlooking the leafy, inner-city-village street below.
It’s hard to believe you’re just around the corner from edgy Kings Cross and that Sydney Harbour is within easy walking distance — although, with marshmallow-soft doubles in every room, you still might not make it to either by midday.
Spa N
Pool N
Price £££
11. Q Station, Manly
Best for Sydney beyond the city
This is a quirky option. On the North Head peninsula of Sydney Harbour National Park, Q Station is based in the structures of a 19th-century quarantine station, which was operational until 1984.
These days the buildings have, thankfully, been transformed into accommodation more redolent of a boutique Butlin’s than a medical facility, but for those interested in its history there are tours plus informative boards dotted around the grounds. There’s a ghost walk too, but the site’s real draw is its natural surroundings, offering Sydney’s only private hotel beach, plus views of bucolic bushland and Sydney Harbour.
Spa N
Pool N
Price £
12. InterContinental Sydney Double Bay, Double Bay
Best for a glamorous getaway
As chic and refined as its upscale Eastern Suburbs location, the five-star InterContinental brushes against expensive restaurants and designer boutiques, with whitewashed, curved balconies and arched windows looking out on to Double Bay’s main shopping strip and the harbour’s inviting waters.
Expect plenty of opulence, with the lobby, bar and bathrooms decked in miles of marble. The property’s well-heeled guests come to be pampered, sip martinis in the cocktail bar — with its collection of 140 obscure and vintage gins — take high tea, and lounge beside the rooftop pool.
Spa Y
Pool Y
Price ££
13. QT Sydney, CBD
Best for design
A lavish lesson in left-field luxury, and a design hotel truly worthy of the moniker, QT Sydney is based in the city’s main shopping district, housed within the former Gowings department store building and the historic State Theatre. Designers have reanimated and reimagined these spaces with a keen eye for blending the elegant with the absurd. All asymmetrical headboards and dogstooth floor tiles, plus QT’s signature silly minibar (think vintage games, a seduction kit and an emergency bow tie), it’s as if Coco Chanel had set up a hotel with Tim Burton.
Spa Y
Pool N
Price ££
14. Kimpton Margot Sydney, CBD
Best for architecture
This 1930s art deco delight — amid the CBD’s department stores — was the headquarters of Sydney’s Sewerage and Drainage Board before it was transformed into the luxury 172-room hotel you see today. Rooms are contemporary and comfortable and the marble bathrooms are a picture of Jazz Age elegance, but it is the original features — from the magnificent curve of its terracotta-tiled façade to the 26ft, blood-red scagliola columns that overlook the lobby — that really make this property shine.
Spa N
Pool Y
Price ££
15. Ace Hotel Sydney, Surry Hills
Best for food
Ace Hotel Sydney is the boutique hotel chain’s first property in the southern hemisphere, and is a hip, exposed-brick-meets-mid-century renovation of an industrial, historic building. Situated in sybaritic Surry Hills, a Sydney suburb known for its fine drinking and dining, Ace Hotel Sydney rightly focuses on its food and beverage options, slinging craft cocktails and small-batch wines and beers from the Lobby Bar; and laid-back, all-day Aussie favourites at downstairs restaurant, Loam. Eighteen floors up, chef of local renown, Mitch Orr — best known for his pasta — heads up the kitchen at the soon-to-open, glass-walled, rooftop restaurant, Kiln, using woodsmoke and umami flavours to produce a rich fusion of southeast Asian, Japanese and Italian cuisines.
Spa N
Pool N
Price ££
16. Crown Sydney, Barangaroo
Best for high rollers
Sydney’s first six-star hotel, Crown Sydney is housed in the city’s tallest, glitziest building, towering over waterfront dining and nightlife precinct Barangaroo. It has been mired in controversy since its launch in December 2020, when the hotel and casino chain was deemed unfit to hold a gambling licence, but the gaming rooms are now open to VIP members. That’s far from the only reason to stay, however, with its 349 luxurious rooms — all clean, contemporary lines, mirrors and marble — affording views across the city in every direction, including some overlooking Sydney Harbour Bridge. The property also offers 14 glamorous dining venues, including a Nobu; an opulent, expansive spa; a huge outdoor pool with harbour views; and even a tennis court.
Spa Y
Pool Y
Price £££
crownsydney.com.au
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