After seven years sitting dormant, one of Victoria’s grandest coastal hotels is back – and it’s more glamorous than ever.
The Bellarine Peninsula has long delivered beachy charm, historic piers and low-key summer escapes. But now it has something new to boast about: the return of a heritage-listed grande dame that once welcomed Melbourne’s elite by paddle steamer.
First established in 1888, The Queenscliff Hotel will reopen in March following an extensive three-year restoration, transforming the landmark into a boutique luxury destination while carefully preserving its architectural soul.
And if the photos are anything to go by, this is not just a refresh. It’s a full-scale revival.
A sleeping beauty, reawakened
Perched in the heart of Queenscliff, the hotel stood empty for seven years, slowly slipping into disrepair. For locals, it was a sad sight: a heritage icon with a turreted tower and ornate ironwork, waiting for someone to bring it back to life.
That someone turned out to be Rob and Tammy Charter, former Queensland avocado farmers with hospitality backgrounds, who purchased the property in December 2022 as their first restoration project. What followed was a meticulous three-year overhaul in consultation with Heritage Victoria and the Borough of Queenscliff, with restoration works led by Matt Wilson from Geelong-based Built by Wilson, architectural and interior design by Melbourne’s MOLECULE Studio and landscaping by InStyle Gardens.
The Queenscliff Hotel stood empty for seven years. (Credit: Neisha Breen Photography)
Melbourne’s MOLECULE Studio led the interior design. (Credit: Neisha Breen Photography)
The restoration has carefully preserved the hotel's architectural soul. (Credit: Neisha Breen Photography)
The result? A seamless blend of Queen Anne-style grandeur and contemporary refinement.
The tower is back – and so are the views
One of the most striking elements of the restoration is the return of the hotel’s turreted viewing tower to its original open-air design. Previously enclosed, it has been structurally rebuilt, complete with a newly crafted spire and turret posts made in Melbourne.
Need tips, more detail or itinerary ideas tailored to you? Ask AT.
AI Prompt
The hotel’s turreted viewing tower was restored to its original open-air design. (Credit: Neisha Breen Photography)
Guests can climb the historic staircase to the top of the tower. (Credit: Neisha Breen Photography)
Take in views over Port Phillip Bay from the tower. (Credit: Neisha Breen Photography)
Guests can once again climb the historic staircase and take in sweeping views over Port Phillip Bay. It’s the kind of detail that elevates a stay from pleasant to memorable, especially at sunset.
The original cast-iron front fence has also been faithfully reconstructed by local tradespeople, reinforcing the hotel’s commitment to heritage integrity rather than cosmetic quick fixes.
Inside the new boutique stay
The reimagined hotel now offers 12 individually designed suites, creating an intimate, boutique experience. Some rooms open directly onto the historic verandah. Two suites – the Beach She Oak and Coconut Palm – are pet friendly, complete with an onsite dog wash for sandy paws. There are also wheelchair-accessible and ambulant-friendly suites, and flexible two-bedroom configurations for families.
The Coconut Palm Suite is pet friendly. (Credit: Neisha Breen Photography)
The Blue Jacaranda Suite is one of two accessible rooms in the hotel. (Credit: Neisha Breen Photography)
The Olive Suite is a king suite with a view over Swan Bay. (Credit: Neisha Breen Photography)
Design-wise, expect a thoughtful interplay between old and new. Heritage features sit alongside contemporary designer furnishings, floor-to-ceiling marble accents and locally crafted details, including alpaca rugs from Creswick Woollen Mills and bespoke Melbourne-made lighting. Original artworks by Bellarine Peninsula artists are displayed throughout and available to purchase.
The Stone Pine Suite has a private verandah. (Credit: Neisha Breen Photography)
The marble bathtub is a highlight in the Stone Pine Suite. (Credit: Neisha Breen Photography)
The premium Stone Pine Suite is the standout: king bed, original fireplaces in both bedroom and marble-clad ensuite, a deep marble bath, walk-in dual shower and a private verandah with bay views. It’s the kind of space built for slow mornings and long soaks after coastal walks.
All stays include complimentary breakfast for the length of your visit, plus access to a guest lounge stocked with books and board games – and, of course, the tower.
A dining revival with serious pedigree
The hotel’s culinary history runs deep. In 1978, culinary icon Mietta O’Donnell brought her celebrated restaurant Miettas to the property. Now, the name returns under executive chef Salvatore Giorgio, with a focus on the richness and diversity of Bellarine Peninsula produce.
Guests also have access to The Conservatory for relaxed contemporary dining, Cafe 1888 for light bites and coffee, and The Boat Bar for pre-dinner cocktails in a sophisticated coastal setting. It’s a multi-venue offering that feels far more destination-led than your average regional hotel.
Weekly travel news, experiences insider tips, offers, and more.
Miettas has a history at The Queenscliff Hotel. (Credit: Neisha Breen Photography)
Bellarine Peninsula produce will be championed at Miettas. (Credit: Neisha Breen Photography)
Start the day at Cafe 1888. (Credit: Neisha Breen Photography)
Enjoy cocktails at The Boat Bar. (Credit: Neisha Breen Photography)
A bathhouse is coming soon
The hotel is also preparing to launch a dedicated Bathhouse – a future wellness retreat designed as a sanctuary of calm for guests.
While an opening date has not yet been announced, the upcoming space will offer steam and sauna rooms for deep relaxation, plunge pools for hot–cold therapy, and a luxurious hydro jet massage table delivering full-body water therapy. Access will be limited to a small number of guests at a time to preserve a sense of privacy, creating an unhurried experience that feels worlds away from the everyday.
Given the Bellarine’s growing appeal for bathhouse escapes, the addition positions The Queenscliff Hotel firmly in the wellness-luxe category – and makes it far more than just a place to sleep.
Details
This seaside icon is ready to make noise again. (Credit: Neisha Breen Photography)
Address: 16 Gellibrand St, Queenscliff, Victoria 3225
When: Full operations for the accommodation, The Conservatory, Cafe 1888 and The Boat Bar commence on Saturday, 14 March, while Miettas will offer an elevated Italian-inspired dining experience from 28 March.
After seven years of silence, the old seaside icon is ready to make noise again.
Want to see more stories from Australian Traveller in your Google search results?
Tick the box next to "Australian Traveller". That's it.
Emily Murphy is Australian Traveller's Email & Social Editor, and in her time at the company she has been instrumental in shaping its social media and email presence, and crafting compelling narratives that inspire others to explore Australia's vast landscapes. Her previous role was a journalist at Prime Creative Media and before that she was freelancing in publishing, content creation and digital marketing. When she's not creating scroll-stopping travel content, Em is a devoted 'bun mum' and enjoys spending her spare time by the sea, reading, binge-watching a good TV show and exploring Sydney's vibrant dining scene. Next on her Aussie travel wish list? Tasmania and The Kimberley.
The Grampians just might be the ultimate antidote for the metropolis, writes one returning Aussie ready to disconnect from the modern world and reconnect to the Great outdoors.
There are no kangaroos back in Chicago: they’re all here in the Grampians/Gariwerd. In the heart of the Grampians National Park’s main gateway town, Halls Gap, pods of eastern greys are eating grass beside my parked rental car beneath the stars. Next morning, when I see the backyard of my rented villa on the edge of town for the first time, there are kangaroos feeding beside a slow-moving creek, lined with river red gums.
Five hundred metres up the road, 50 or so of them are eating by the side of the road in a paddock. I pull over to watch and spot three emus. Yellow-tailed black cockatoos fly overhead towards the tall green mountains just beyond town.
‘Kee-ow, keee-oww’… their calls fuse with the maniacal cackle of a kookaburra (or 10). Gawd, how I’ve missed the sound of them. Far above, a wedge-tailed eagle watches, and there you go: the ‘great birds of Australia’ trifecta, all half a kay from the town limits.
Exchanging city chaos for country calm
The park is renowned for its significant diversity of native fauna species. (Image: Visit Victoria/Robert Blackburn)
I’ve come to the Grampians to disconnect, but the bush offers a connection of its own. This isn’t just any bush, mind you. The Grampians National Park is iconic for many reasons, mostly for its striking sandstone mountains – five ridges run north to south, with abrupt, orange slopes which tumble right into Halls Gap – and for the fact there’s 20,000 years of traditional rock art. Across these mountains there are more than 200 recorded sites to see, created by the Djab Wurrung, Jardwadjali and Gunditjmara peoples. It’s just like our outback… but three hours from Melbourne.
I’ve come here for a chance at renewal after the chaos of my life in America’s third-largest city, Chicago, where I live for now, at the whim of a relative’s cancer journey. Flying into Melbourne’s airport, it only takes an hour’s drive to feel far away from any concept of suburbia. When I arrive in Halls Gap two hours later, the restaurant I’m eating at clears out entirely by 7:45pm; Chicago already feels a lifetime ago.
The trails and treasures of the Grampians
Grampians National Park /Gariwerd covers almost 2000 square kilometres. (Image: Ben Savage)
Though the national park covers almost 2000 square kilometres, its best-known landmarks are remarkably easy to access. From my carpark here, among the cockatoos and kangaroos on the fringe of Halls Gap, it only takes 60 seconds’ driving time before I’m winding my way up a steep road through rainforest, deep into the mountains.
Then it’s five minutes more to a carpark that serves as a trailhead for a hike to one of the park’s best vantage points, The Pinnacles. I walk for an hour or so, reacquainting myself with the smells and the sounds of the Aussie bush, before I reach it: a sheer cliff’s edge lookout 500 metres up above Halls Gap.
Overlooking the vast Grampians landscape from Hollow Mountain. (Image: Robert Blackburn)
There are hikes and there are lookouts and waterfalls all across this part of the park near town. Some are a short stroll from a carpark; others involve long, arduous hikes through forest. The longest is the Grampians Peaks Trail, Victoria’s newest and longest iconic walk, which runs 160 kilometres – the entire length of Grampians National Park.
Local activities operator Absolute Outdoors shows me glimpses of the trail. The company’s owner, Adrian Manikas, says it’s the best walk he’s done in Australia. He says he’s worked in national parks across the world, but this was the one he wanted to bring his children up in.
“There’s something about the Grampians,” he says, as he leads me up a path to where there’s wooden platforms for tents, beside a hut looking straight out across western Victoria from a kilometre up in the sky (these are part of the guided hiking options for the trail). “There are things out here that you won’t see anywhere else in Australia.” Last summer, 80 per cent of the park was damaged by bushfire, but Manikas shows me its regrowth, and tells me of the manic effort put in by volunteers from town – with firefighters from all over Australia – to help save Halls Gap.
Spot wildflowers. (Image: Visit Victoria)
We drive back down to Halls Gap at dusk to abseil down a mountain under the stars, a few minutes’ walk off the main road into town. We have headlamps, but a full moon is enough to light my way down. It takes blind faith to walk backwards down a mountain into a black void, though the upside is I can’t see the extent of my descent.
Grampians National Park at sunset. (Image: Wine Australian)
The stargazing is ruined by the moon, of course, but you should see how its glow lights up the orange of the sandstone, like in a theme park. When I’m done, I stand on a rocky plateau drinking hot chocolate and listening to the Aussie animals who prefer nighttime. I can see the streets of Halls Gap off in the distance on this Friday night. The restaurants may stay open until 8pm tonight.
What else is on offer in The Grampians?
Travelling along the Wimmera River in Dimboola. (Image: Chris McConville)
You’ll find all sorts of adventures out here – from rock climbing to canoeing to hiking – but there’s more to the Grampians than a couple of thousand square kilometres of trees and mountains. Halls Gap may be known to most people, but what of Pomonal, and Dimboola, and Horsham? Here in the shadow of those big sandstone mountains there are towns and communities most of us don’t know to visit.
And who knew that the Grampians is home to Victoria’s most underrated wine region? My disconnection this morning comes not in a forest, but in the tasting rooms and winery restaurants of the district. Like Pomonal Estate, barely 10 minutes’ drive east of Halls Gap, where UK-born chef Dean Sibthorp prepares a locally caught barramundi with lentil, pumpkin and finger lime in a restaurant beside the vines at the base of the Grampians. Husband-and-wife team Pep and Adam Atchison tell me stories as they pour their prize wines (shiraz is the hero in these parts).
Dine in a restaurant beside vines at Pomonal Estate. (Image: Tourism Australia)
Three minutes’ drive back down the road, long-time mates Hadyn Black and Darcy Naunton run an eclectic cellar door out of a corrugated iron shed, near downtown Pomonal. The Christmas before last, half the houses in Pomonal burnt down in a bushfire, but these locals are a resilient lot.
The fires also didn’t stop the construction of the first art centre in Australia dedicated to environmental art in a nature-based precinct a little further down the road (that’s Wama – the National Centre for Environmental Arts), which opened in July. And some of the world’s oldest and rarest grape vines have survived 160 years at Best’s Wines, outside the heritage town of Great Western. There’s plantings here from the year 1868, and there’s wines stored in century-old barrels within 150-year-old tunnels beneath the tasting room. On the other side of town, Seppelt Wines’ roots go back to 1865. They’re both only a 30-minute drive from Halls Gap.
Great Western is a charming heritage town. (Image: Griffin Simm)
There’s more to explore yet; I drive through tiny historic towns that barely make the map. Still part of the Grampians, they’re as pretty as the mountains behind them: full of late 19th-century/early 20th-century post offices, government offices and bank buildings, converted now to all manner of bric-a-brac stores and cafes.
The Imaginarium is one, in quirky Dimboola, where I sleep in the manager’s residence of an old National Australia Bank after a gourmet dinner at the local golf club, run by noted chef and teacher, Cat Clarke – a pioneer of modern Indigenous Australian cooking. Just south, I spend an entire afternoon at a winery, Norton Estate Wines, set on rolling calico-coloured hills that make me think of Tuscany, chit-chatting with owners Chris and Sam Spence.
Being here takes me back two decades, when I lived here for a time. It had all seemed as foreign as if I’d driven to another planet back then (from Sydney/Warrane), but there seemed something inherently and immediately good about this place, like I’d lived here before.
And it’s the Australian small-town familiarity of the Grampians that offers me connection back to my own country. Even in the better-known Halls Gap, Liz from Kerrie’s Creations knows I like my lattes with soy milk and one sugar. And while I never do get the name of the lady at the local Ampol station, I sure know a lot about her life.
Kookaburras are one of some 230 bird species. (Image: Darren Donlen)
You can be a local here in a day; how good is that? In Chicago, I don’t even know who my neighbour is. Though each day at dusk – when the kangaroos gather outside my villa, and the kookaburras and the black cockatoos shout out loud before settling in to sleep – I prefer the quieter connection I get out there in the bush, beneath these orange mountains.
A traveller’s checklist
Staying there
Sleep beside the wildlife on the edge of Halls Gap at Serenity.
