As with many of the desirable Australian accommodations drawing the “stuck down under” tourist cohort, a new, very chic boutique hotel, The Surf, has an embarrassment of forward bookings. The best rooms with the best Pacific outlook are well subscribed, well ahead. In Yamba.
Although a glorious part of the NSW coast, 130 kilometres north of Coffs Harbour, Yamba is not Byron Bay. And, despite all the incoming relocators from Sydney who’ve been arriving as permanents for the past 18 months, what was until recently a sleepy, water-wrapped holiday hamlet at the nexus of the Clarence River and the ocean, Yamba never wants to be like Byron Bay.
“We’re on the up and up,” says Elders Yamba agent Vicki Seekamp. “I’ve got 7500 people registered as buyers for new listings and they’re not dropping off.”
Indeed, she’s been setting records selling sites for millions – “properties up on the hill, where everyone wants to be, but where it’s hard to get into”.
But the next Byron Bay? No … the residents don’t want that tag at all.
“This is a quieter, more family-oriented town where you can still get a [car] park. We’re not a party town,” Seekamp says.
With a three-storey height limit on new developments, she adds, “we don’t want to be the next Gold Coast either”.
Seekamp hopes that attitude, and the fact that the townlet is almost at the limits of its possible available land growth, will save it from the fate that can arrive with international Insta fame.
The height limit also explains, in part, the charming scale of The Surf, a 12-suite, almost-on-the-beach development that replaced a rundown 1920s motel that was demolished in 2019 and replaced by a building that pays homage to its predecessor in “streamline moderne deco” styling.
The old place was bought by the grazier Mayne family in 2009 and, says Jon King, the architect who designed the new iteration of The Surf, they’d always had the ambition to pull down “the shabby old motel that was completely run down”.
While design schemes commenced in 2012, planning hurdles, big storms and then COVID-19 delayed the realisation of the replacement that finally opened in September 2021. But, according to King, principal of the Sydney-based Design King Company, the long pauses have served the end product well.
“Yamba was ready for it,” he says. “With the big road [the Pacific Highway completion] and Ballina airport [upgrading], the timing turned out to be the best thing because COVID has also rearranged NSW tourism.”
On a relatively small 520-square-metre site, The Surf is a gorgeous, almost European pensione-like building, an allusion emphasised by striped awnings and its setting directly on the Queen Street pavement.
While built to “a sensible budget”, King says, the construction delays allowed specifications and detail tweaking to continue all the while until The Surf emerged “as a place that feels private and comfortable with intimate rooms.”
Admittedly, the roof deck with the epic views is movie-set lovely but is also of modest, almost domestic scaling.
With his practice also doing the interiors, King says the hotel is an architectural summary “of all the best places I’ve been around the world”.
“It’s an evocation of the sorts of places in Spain and on the Amalfi Coast that you get to down cobbled streets. It’s got a little bit of all of them in it,” he says.
For all of that bespoke sophistication, King reckons The Surf is also “very Yamba”.
“It’s a very local project in terms of the people who built it,” he says. “We used a lot of local expertise and the contractors are all very proud.
“It’s a bit of an everybody’s hotel. It’s open to all different types of demographics and age groups. It was not targeted at other architects. It belongs to Yamba and the feedback has been amazing.
“We never had a building that in a popular sense has resonated so much with people.”
The Surf has been shortlisted in the commercial sector of the 2022 NSW Architectural Awards that will be decided in July.