Ladies Parlour

The ladies' parlour at the Terminus Hotel is a smaller room off the main bar, with its own street entrance and a separate counter. The walls are papered in a faded floral print. A small fireplace sits on the back wall. A row of stools at the counter, padded in vinyl, has remained in place. The room is more decorated than the public bar, with mouldings around the doorways and a pressed-metal ceiling rosette in the centre. The light from the John Street side comes in through a stained-glass panel above the door.

Federation-era NSW liquor licensing kept the Public Bar as a male-only space and required licensed pubs to provide a separate Ladies Parlour for women drinking on premises. The Terminus's parlour was part of the 1917 Tooth and Co. rebuild of the building, set up as a self-contained room with its own street entrance for women patrons. By the 1950s the arrangement was loosening: the Pyrmont History Group records the Ladies Parlour merged with the Public Bar at the Terminus in that decade. The room kept its decorative fit-out through the merge and into the 1983 closure. The 2018 restoration kept the parlour as a separate room, no longer for the original legal reason.