Twin Willows

An illuminated ROOM ENTRANCE sign burns above a narrow door at the rear of the Twin Willows, and it is the only lit thing on the building. Yellow face brick runs the length of the single-storey wing beneath a bank of small awning windows, with louvred service panels set at intervals between them. To the right, a roller door carries NO PARKING in stencilled capitals. Behind the roofline a pale blue clad upper storey rises against the sky. The car park in front is empty, the asphalt dry and unmarked. The exposure ran 10 seconds, long enough to smear the cloud above the roof.

The Twin Willows was photographed at 22:30 on 2 April 2018, at its rear accommodation entrance rather than its frontage. It is the one property in Hotel Motel 101 that was not a traditional motor inn. The series covered 101 roadside motels across three sweeps out of Sydney in 2018: north along the Central Coast, west through the Blue Mountains, south to the start of the South Coast. Drive-thru reception, parking in front of the rooms, low rise. Roughly 120 properties were visited across the three runs, 101 were photographed, and the rest were passed over because the conditions were not right.