A luxury hotel refitted for contemporary use

“The past is not dead. It is not even past,” William Faulkner once penned. There is a certain poetry in restoration. In cities shaped by time, the act of revisiting a landmark is about recalibration. What do we keep? What do we let go? What does it mean to occupy heritage without romanticising it? The Sofitel Sydney Wentworth has never been a neutral building. From its inception in 1966, this curved monolith of sandstone brick and steel carried the aspirations of an emerging global c