The Colonial Motel

The Colonial Motel takes its name from the colonial-era settler aesthetic, the property carrying decorative details that reach for the nineteenth-century Australian-vernacular building idiom: a verandah along the front of the rooms, paired columns at the office entry, and a small white-and-blue colour scheme that distinguishes the property from the standard motor-inn brick. The building is single-storey, the room doors facing the front carpark behind the verandah. A pole sign at the kerb carries the property name in a serif face. The carpark is empty in the late evening. A single security light at the office end throws hard cones across the asphalt.

The Colonial Motel was photographed at 22:41 on 9 April 2018, on the western Hawkesbury run of Hotel Motel 101. The project covered 101 traditional Australian motor inns across three sweeps out of Sydney in late March and early April 2018: south on the Hume, north on the Pacific, west on the Great Western. Drive-thru reception, parking in front of the rooms, low rise. Colonial-themed naming and architectural detailing sat inside the Australian motel's broader habit of reaching for settler-period reference, the verandah-and-column motif a standard short-cut to that period idiom.