Hobart's new $400 million hotel at MONA unveiled

Hobart's world-famous MONA has unveiled details of its plans for a new five-star waterfront hotel. 

MONA owner David Walsh announced today that the new hotel will not be named HOMO, or HOON, as had been mooted, but Motown.

The design, like the name, has been recycled through many iterations, emerging through the collective efforts of architect Nonda Katsalidis, Walsh and others.

"We wanted an inverted suspension bridge," Walsh said on the MONA website. "But then the value engineers got at it. Now it’s a shopping trolley that looks a bit like an inverted suspension bridge."

The five-star hotel complex will encompass 172 rooms looking towards kunanyi/Mt Wellington or up the Derwent River towards Claremont and Otago Bay. There will be a theatre, spa centre, outdoor concert stage and library (below), as well as conference and auditorium facilities, and several new artworks. 

Several of the high-end rooms will feature works by "some really-quite-good artists" Walsh says.

The new library will be spread over three levels and will house Walsh's "large and growing nerd fest of bibliophilic paraphernalia", including Einstein, Newton, Darwin and Dickens. 

Hotel access will be mainly via the water with Venice-style motoscafi ferries dreamed up in collaboration with Mona’s ferry operators, Navigators. There will be another ferry, and eventually a boardwalk link to the main road.

Walsh says the new hotel complex should be opened by 2024 and will cost $400 million. 

Mona’s development application for Motown has been submitted to Crown Land Services and Glenorchy City Council. Once Crown approval has been granted, the development application assessment process will formally commence with Glenorchy City Council.