Alex Hotel

If the owners of your favorite café — or in this case, your favorite wine bar or small-batch distillery — suddenly got into the hotel game, you’d probably sit up and notice. So it is with Alex Hotel, located in the heart of Perth’s buzzing Cultural Centre neighborhood. The team behind it already had a good thing going before opening the doors to this cool 74-room hotel. Several good things, in fact, and Alex Hotel is just the latest in a series.

The building is airy and industrial, encased with glass that lets the sunshine into the lobby espresso bar, perfectly lighting the lavish and eminently Instagram-ready continental breakfast spread. Food and drink, and more importantly, socializing in general, are guiding concepts here — fitting, given that the owners are known first and foremost as purveyors of locally roasted coffee, craft beer, and artisanal spirits. They’d be the first to say that guest rooms (“creative bases,” to borrow their phrase) are not the most important part of the hotel. The look is simple but stylish, the beds made up in Italian linens and blankets by local brand Bemboka, the bathrooms stocked with Sodashi products, also local.

The point of staying at Alex Hotel isn’t to hole up in your room, anyway: it’s all about communal spaces here, from the colorful Mezzanine lounge space with its work stations and shaded outdoor terraces — an ideal place to get some work done or help yourself to a glass of wine from the honesty bar while poking through a small library of books and magazines — to the sultry Shadow Wine Bar & Dining Room. The hands-down highlight is the rooftop terrace, the place to be at sunset. Looking down over the cityscape of repurposed warehouses, you might plan your bicycle route for the next day: you won’t be surprised to know that Alex Hotel offers up a fleet of Lekker bikes for guest use. They’ll even give you a lock and a helmet, and a map, marked up (on request) with the staff’s top picks for shopping, dining, and drinking around town.