This young Victorian architect designed The Ritz-Carlton Gold Coast

For this reason, the appointment of Kennon to design Ritz-Carlton’s first hotel on the Gold Coast (its third in Australia) could be considered a left-field choice.

Developers Ross Pelligra and Dion Giannarelli tapped Kennon to design the 150-room hotel at Mariner’s Cove, between Marina Mirage and the Southport Yacht Club, after they bought the 1.15-hectare site in late 2021 for $54 million. Their $480 million development, which includes the hotel and a 100-berth superyacht marina, has yet to be approved by Gold Coast City Council.

When the idiosyncratic U-shaped hotel opens some time next year, it will have 150 rooms and suites as well as an extensive restaurant and entertainment quarter.

“When you think of Ritz-Carlton you think of a formal design and mahogany-panelled walls with big double-height lobbies,” says Kennon. “We are challenging Marriot Bonvoy [owners of the Ritz-Carlton brand] and the design standards of Ritz-Carlton and taking on the flavour of the Gold Coast in the process.”

The Ritz-Carlton Gold Coast is a low-rise, resort-style hotel and what it lacks in height – in a city famous for its verticality – it makes up for in length. The horseshoe design is about 200 metres long, with the hotel rooms surrounding an outdoor piazza and a mix of hospitality venues plus an area for live entertainment. The minimum floor area for guest rooms is 50 square metres and the biggest suite will be 275 sq m.

“I hope this project leads us to do more of this sort of work,” says Kennon. “But I’m more attracted to possibly working on smaller-scale boutique hotels that [can] have a strong design concept to them.”

As an architectural and interior design firm, Kennon is at a crossroads. As well as large-scale developments like the Ritz-Carlton, the studio has worked with property developers on apartment buildings and has just completed its first multi-storey office building in Melbourne, at 550 Spencer Street – the first building in Australia to have an integrated solar-panel facade.

But the firm continues to design one-off family homes – a much less lucrative project.

“I’m trying to work out who we are because when you’re a start-up business you take on everything and anything pretty quickly,” says Kennon. “And that was something I didn’t like about working for a big practice, where you grow so much you just have to feed the beast and you do lots of work for the revenue. I’m trying now to not be tempted by every opportunity.”

The business today has two streams, says Kennon: large developer-driven projects and family houses. It’s these residences he is most passionate about and finds most rewarding, he says.

“You make thousands of decisions for a client when it’s their home and with each one of them you have to be guided by what’s in their best interest,” he says. “They don’t even know what you go through to make that decision, but when they move in, there’ll be a point when they phone you up – usually after a month – and tell you it’s just a treat to be there, and that they’ve discovered all these little details. You don’t get that with the bigger projects.”

Kennon says his firm didn’t set out to design high-end luxury homes, but he has certainly made his mark in that rarefied sector. One such residence is the Byron Bay home of Anthony Catalano, the owner of Raes on Wategos hotel. The design was inspired by the coastal castles of Italy, Kennon explains, and the inclusion of materials that related to their environment.

Asked to describe his firm’s signature style, Kennon says there isn’t one.

“When we first meet with a new residential client, we talk to them about the homes they grew up in and their family’s journey, and we uncover so many interesting things,” he says.

“The design we come up with is a direct response to that conversation and that design only works for them.

“In every project, there’s no language that relates to me or to my style or aesthetic,” he says. “Even with a strong developer-driven project like the Ritz-Carlton, that’s a design that is specifically for that client and their needs. It’s also specifically for the Gold Coast.”