We started day 2 of Open House with putting our names down for the Central Park rooftop tours, then slowly meandered our way to Northbridge for the tour of Alex Hotel. On our way, we stopped by Perth Town Hall and did a quick tour with one of the staff members. It’s a quaint little historic building that is popular for events in the city. I’m looking forward to a close friend’s wedding here in a week’s time!
Alex Hotel is one of those cool little buildings in Perth that I’ve always want to visit as part of Open House over the years, but I haven’t been organised enough (until this year!) to snap up some free tour tickets that are normally released a few weeks before Open House. It was really interesting to hear about the concept and construction of this inner city boutique hotel. It was cool to hear that a lot of the materials and furnishings were obtained from Australian or New Zealand manufacturers. You can tell how important it was to the owners of the hotel that it was built and ran according to their vision. I appreciated the simple, industrial and unfinished design of the hotel. It gives off a homely chic down to earth feel rather than a high end luxury hotel.
The rooftop garden was a cool little area with a great view of the city and the Northbridge streets below.
After our 1 hour tour of Alex Hotel, we trekked back to the other side of the city for our Central Park rooftop tour. We had the building management manager as our tour guide and she was pretty cool, very friendly and answered all our questions. She was happy for us to explore and walk around the top at our own pace. We could see the new Perth Stadium from the distance, the Perth Arena and all the construction that’s currently happening in Perth.
Even though it was getting late and I specifically was getting quite hungry, we decided to power through and check out the new Channel 9 Studio down the Terrace. That was probably the place where we had to wait the longest to get in. The tour of the studio was pretty interesting though we did move through it quite quickly so not many shots turned out that exciting. We got a peak into the production and editing rooms, the dressing/hair/makeup rooms, the floor where the news reporters work on their stories and lastly the studio area in which we see on the TV. It was really interesting to see how much technology goes into the workings of a studio and no longer is it as labour intensive as it once used to be.
After our tour of Channel 9 Studios, we grabbed a fairly late lunch at Satchmo & Co. the fried chicken burger was super tasty, having the watermelon after the burger was refreshing, and I felt really cut into the grease. The next blog post will show case the residential spots we managed to squeeze into the remainder of our Sunday afternoon. Thanks for stopping by today.
J
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