Just ahead, you’ll spot a grand, three-storey red-brick building with cream trim and ornate iron balconies, proudly sitting on the corner where St Georges Terrace meets William Street-just look for the stately dome crowning its roof and the elegant details that give it away as the Palace Hotel.
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re standing at this very spot in 1897. The gold rush is lighting up Western Australia with the promise of fortune, and right before you stands one of the most celebrated buildings in the land: the newly opened Palace Hotel. People were dazzled by its luxury-reporters said it was fit for Paris under Napoleon III, but with maybe just a little more outback swagger! Its marble fireplaces and Italian mosaic entrance were the height of elegance. Inside, the very first lift in Perth whisked wealthy guests and gold-hungry prospectors upstairs. There were 50 bedrooms on the first floor alone, ten whole bathrooms, and electric lights and bells in every room, which was really something for the time.
But the Palace Hotel’s story stretches well before its grand opening. From at least the 1830s, this site was Perth’s buzziest social hotspot. It started as the King’s Head Hotel, where William Dixon presided over hearty banquets-think nine different meats and three types of dessert at King’s birthday parties. Then the place changed hands to William Henry Leeder, becoming Leeder’s Hotel, before transforming again into the Freemasons’ Tavern, home to the state’s first Masonic lodge. Important city decisions-like creating the police force-were hotly debated over dinner here. Over the decades, it hosted a string of colorful owners: politicians, future premiers, and even an energetic horseman named George Towton who seemed to run a hotel and a race track with equal enthusiasm.
By the late 1880s, the building was due for change. It was almost lost to fire-though, thankfully, not to bad cooking! American entrepreneur John De Baun swooped in, bought the property for a sum that would make your eyes water even today, and declared, “Spare no expense!” The result? The Palace Hotel: Federation Free Classical architecture as Perth had never seen, dripping in “bourgeois luxury.”
As decades passed, more and more wings and wonders were added-one year it was a grand dining hall, the next, more suites, a writing room, even a bar hidden away in what used to be the billiard basement. At one point, the hotel boasted 130 bedrooms. In the 1950s, they swapped the timber verandas for space-age cantilevered concrete, and by the 1960s the words ‘De Baun’s Palace Hotel’ still glimmered above its entrance-just in case anyone forgot whose palace it was.
Now, the Palace Hotel was almost lost forever when the Commonwealth Banking Corporation bought it in the 1970s, planning to flatten it for a high-rise tower. Enter the “Palace Guards!” No, not royal soldiers with bushy hats-these were passionate locals, activists, and even green-banned union workers who campaigned night and day to save their city’s architectural jewel. Perth’s citizens won that battle, and not only preserved this gorgeous façade, but helped shape heritage preservation for all of Western Australia.
In the 1980s, the building finally closed as a hotel, parts of its interior were redeveloped, and a gleaming modern tower rose behind it. But the Palace Hotel’s beautiful red brick and iron face refused to budge. Today, it houses the offices of Woods Bagot, Adapptor, and Hatchd-imagine those gold rush party-goers trying to get their heads around that! Yet the ornate details, grand windows, and decorative flourishes remain, telling everyone who passes that this was-and still is-a building of dreams, ambition, and just a little bit of wild west glamour.
So while you’re standing here, in the shadow of what was once the finest hotel in all of Australasia, just think: from wild gold parties to protest marches, from high society to civic drama, the Palace Hotel has seen it all. And with that grand dome peeking out overhead, you just know this corner of Perth is still very much alive with stories.
