Adina Apartment Hotel Brisbane – Hotel Review

Adina Apartment Hotel Brisbane is close to anywhere you’d want to go in that city: should you skip the plentiful bike, rideshare and public transport options, the cultural precinct and South Bank are a 15-minute walk across Victoria Bridge. Read on for the full review. 

Rooms are chic and comfy and frankly it would be wonderful to live here but the main beauty of this hotel is, well, its beauty. It occupies a restored Heritage-listed sandstone building from 1922 that first housed the Queensland Government Savings Bank; its lobby – with original timber panelling and ornate, eight-metre-high ceilings – was once a banking chamber.

Where is Adina Apartment Hotel Brisbane?

About 20 minutes from the airport, the hotel sits inside Brisbane’s CBD on the corner of George and Elizabeth streets. 

What’s near Adina Apartment Hotel Brisbane?

The Myer Centre is diagonally across the road from one side, the Treasury Casino from the other and the Queen Street Mall a four-minute walk away, tops. South Bank and the ever-popular QAGOMA is only 15 minutes away on foot.

Room types

There are 220 studio, one-, two- and three-bedrooms here, with the smallest 28-square-metre ones offering a kitchenette and the 140-square-metre three-bedroom penthouse apartment considerably more: two kitchens, two dining/living areas and three bathrooms. Then there are those floor-to-ceiling windows. The modern, homey Premier Three-Bedroom Apartment with Balcony overlooks everything great about this city: Heritage buildings and the Brisbane River below, and beyond to the Gallery of Modern Art, illuminated each night.

Restaurants and bars

The on-site Donna Chang is vibrant and well-reviewed, offering inventive Chinese (think roasted half duck with Davidson plum and five-spice). It’s a transporting interior, with the 1920s grandeur of a sweeping staircase and a cold section of birds and pigs in the open kitchen. Downstairs – where the vaults used to be – is the Boom Boom Room cocktail bar, with Japanese-inspired in-room dining. 

Travel for work

Wi-fi is, as it should be, free. There are no conference facilities at this Adina but Donna Chang has three private dining rooms on the mezzanine level and the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre is six minutes away by car, 12 on foot.

Gym and pool

Apart from the immaculately maintained gym – machines are by Technogym – there’s a heated 12-metre pool that begs for backstroke; look up between 12 storeys of stone and brick walls to the open Brisbane sky above. If the outdoors call, it’s a 13-minute walk down George Street to the City Botanical Gardens, where there’s a separate riverside pathway for cyclists.

What you need to know

Some of the bathrooms in the hotel, including the one in room 218, retain a bank vault with its original door; walls are a privacy-guaranteeing 40cm thick.

SEE ALSO: The Best Hotels in Brisbane City (For Every Type of Traveller)