25hours Hotel The Olympia, Sydney, Australia
A Heritage Cinema Reborn as a Flamboyant Celebration of Sydney’s Creative Spirit
Why DNA Hotels Loves It
● A heritage-listed former cinema transformed into a theatrical design hotel that embraces Oxford Street’s history of performance, nightlife, and queer culture.
● 109 guestrooms divided between the colourful Dreamers and moodier Renegades, turning cinematic archetypes into immersive interiors with genuine personality.
● Four distinctive food and drink venues, including The Palomar and rooftop bar Monica, make the hotel as much a neighbourhood social hub as a place to sleep.
The Show Goes On
Some buildings deserve a second act. After years hidden behind scaffolding, the former West Olympia Theatre has returned to Oxford Street as 25hours Hotel The Olympia—the German-born brand’s first Australian hotel. Its location, where Paddington, Surry Hills, Darlinghurst, Kings Cross, and Moore Park converge, places it at the crossroads of some of Sydney’s most culturally charged neighbourhoods. Once a cinema and later home to the legendary Grand Pacific Blue Room, the building has always been about entertainment. 25hours simply turns the lights back on.
Oxford Street in Hotel Form
The Olympia could hardly belong anywhere else. Oxford Street’s history of theatre, fashion, nightlife, rebellion, and LGBTQIA+ culture provides much of the hotel’s creative energy. Rather than sanitising that history, the designers lean into it, creating a property that feels connected to the personalities and subcultures that have shaped this part of Sydney. It is colourful, irreverent, and deliberately social. A hotel with the volume turned up.
Cinema Without the Nostalgia
The restored Edwardian architecture provides the historic framework, but inside, things become considerably more playful. References to the building’s cinematic past appear throughout: check-in resembles a retro video store, VHS tapes line shelves, commissioned artwork by Sydney artist Kubi Vasak adds another local layer, and theatrical details transform corridors and guestrooms into something closer to a film set than a conventional hotel. Tonkin Zulaikha Greer, Indyk Architects, and Woods Bagot worked across the project, allowing heritage and fantasy to coexist without either overwhelming the other. The past provides the script. The interiors rewrite it.
Dreamers and Renegades
The 109 rooms are divided into two distinct characters. Dreamers are lighter, brighter, and more whimsical; Renegades turn towards darker colours and a more seductive mood. Both use cinema as inspiration without becoming themed rooms, mixing original architectural details with bold contemporary furnishings, art, pattern, and unexpected visual references. There is little interest in anonymous luxury here. Choose your character and enter the story.
Sydney Comes Inside
Like the best 25hours hotels, The Olympia is designed to attract locals as much as overnight guests. The Palomar brings its celebrated London concept to Sydney with food influenced by Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Levant. The Mulwray shifts into a more intimate register with cocktails and biodynamic wines, while Jacob the Angel handles coffee, pastries, and the daytime crowd. Then there is Monica. The rooftop bar brings skyline views, DJs, live music, and a touch of old-Hollywood glamour to Oxford Street—a fitting final scene for a building that spent much of its life devoted to entertainment.
Why It Works
25hours Hotel The Olympia understands that heritage preservation doesn’t have to mean reverence without fun. Instead of freezing a former theatre in time, it gives the building another cultural life—one shaped by cinema, art, food, music, queer history, and the restless personality of Oxford Street itself. Bold, eccentric, and gloriously social, this is a hotel that doesn’t merely occupy Sydney’s creative landscape. It joins the performance.
