About a month ago, we atten­ded the open­ing of the Park Hotel where we ate amaz­ing canapes from Ster­ling (which we have raved about before), and heard newly crowned may­or Justin Lester say that Wel­ling­ton needs 1000 new hotel rooms to sus­tain growth (the Park Hotel has 137, fyi). We had a thor­oughly excel­lent time, and were well pleased to hear that they’re doing their best to rein­vig­or­ate the  soul­free zone that is the Ter­race. It was fun to get a tour through some of their rooms too and I have The Pavil­ion in mind if I ever get to host a fancy party.

So when the lovely people at the Park Hotel invited us to stay a night and pro­duce a full review, we were more than happy to do it. Kris and I decided we’d have a girls’ night in because why should couples have all the hotel fun?

The night we checked in was the Fri­day a couple of days before the earth­quake, so here’s the most import­ant thing you need to know: the hotel is open and oper­at­ing as nor­mal. It has been assessed and the build­ing is cleared as safe for occu­pancy fol­low­ing the earth­quake.

We were prom­ised an Exec­ut­ive King Stu­dio but look­ing at the site now, I think we were in a Super­i­or King Stu­dio. Not to worry, there was plenty of space for five girls to flop over the bed, in the super com­fy arm­chairs and desk­chair and drink a little bub­bly before din­ner.

Pic­ture stolen from their web­site because I suck at tak­ing pho­tos, basic­ally

The hotel is an old 70s/80s office build­ing but the inside is really nice. The front desk stocks Wel­ling­ton products from Six Bar­rel Soda Co, Fix & Fogg and the Wel­ling­ton Chocol­ate fact­ory, and there’s a grow­ing lib­rary shelf of books left behind by oth­ers. You need your key card to access your floor in the lift, which is great for secur­ity, but not so great when you have guests com­ing, and you have to plunge the room into dark­ness to take the key down to meet them. Luck­ily the doors are the more mod­ern kind of key card entrance where you just have to wave the cards at them rather than the tricky insert, wait, pull out sys­tem.

The rooms at the Park Hotel have more per­son­al­ity than the beige bed­spread styl­ings of too many hotels.  They have open­ing win­dows (though the handles on one of ours were broken), and while they’re not double-glazed, the Ter­race and Lamb­ton Quay are not known for being par­tic­u­larly rowdy at night. The interi­or of the room looks like it would get a sol­id 9/10 points from The Block judges, with a wood fea­ture wall, cop­per accents and vaguely Scandi fur­niture. Import­antly it had wine glasses and tum­blers we could drink from, and you could­n’t hear people pee­ing in the bath­room, which is really nice.

Speak­ing of the bath­room, it was com­pact, but func­tion­al. We took a photo of an aver­age size per­son in the bath for scale.

an average size person in a fairly small bathtub

The bed, mean­while, was plenty big, and I bloody loved the little grey com­fort­er on the end, per­fect for nap­ping under.

image of three people lying in bed wearing face masks

But before we had facials we had din­ner down­stairs in Ster­ling, which is quite lively on Fri­day nights now with post-work drink­ers and then clev­er diners. I’d been haunt­ing the online menu since we first made our plans, and I was determ­ined to order a great big piece of beef for us to share. Ima­gine my sad­ness when I dis­covered they’d updated their menu! And then ima­gine my joy when it turned out that a bone-in roast was on spe­cial! So many feel­ings! So we got our 800 grams of meat and two sides for $70. In fact, the five of us ordered two starters (ostrich carpac­cio and bruschetta with peas, sor­rel and goat bacon – that goat bacon was frick­ing AMAZING), and five sides with our beef.

bruschetta and carpaccio

The pigs’ ears were much like cala­mari being chewy and deep fried, to be hon­est, but the oth­er salads were nice but not espe­cially note­able. The beef was fab­ulous though, and the wait staff did­n’t bat an eye when I asked for the bone to go for my cats. All that food plus two bottles of red wine came to $224 for five people, which is pretty damn reas­on­able.

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Back in the room we tried to fig­ure out what the weird build­ing in the dis­tances was (turns out it’s the Wel­ling­ton Club which every­body but us knew). We ordered more tow­els since we were doing beauty treat­ments and they arrived in four minutes flat. Excel­lent ser­vice. I went home to my own bed and cats some­time in the early morn­ing, so I’ll let Kris pick up the nar­rat­ive here about how she slept and break­fast in the morn­ing. Take it away, Kris!

I was very ready for bed by the time Jo left. Lots of laugh­ing, wine, and good food will do that to a woman. We’d had the blinds open all even­ing to look at the city lights. I was impressed by the amount of light they blocked out when I dropped them down. I can­’t sleep unless the room is dark so this was good for me. With the win­dows closed it was really quiet. The bed was super com­fort­able with enough blankets that if there were two people in the bed with dif­fer­ing needs for warmth both people could be happy. I got a small sleep in the next day – although I could have slept for anoth­er hour I had a break­fast date to get to (note: stand­ard check­out time is 11am, rather than 10am which is nice). After a quick shower (aer­ated shower head with good pres­sure) and I was back down­stairs to Ster­ling for break­fast.

The break­fast-included menu is dif­fer­ent to the reg­u­lar res­taur­ant menu. The day we were there a large group had got in before us so a couple of the dishes wer­en’t avail­able. Not that it mattered to us. I went for the ham and cheese crois­sant. It was a per­fect blend of but­tery crois­sant, tasty ham, and melted cheese. J chose the toasted bagel with egg and avo­cado salad, and water­cress. The egg and avo­cado is more of a mash than a salad. J star­ted off eat­ing it sus­pi­ciously and by the end had decided that they’d order it again.

I took J upstairs to see the room as they’d worked in the build­ing when it was a office block. It turns out their desk used to be loc­ated where the desk in the room was! We also ran into someone else we knew who we had­n’t seen for a while. Wel­ling­ton really is the best city for catch­ing up with friends. Then it was check­out time and out onto Lamb­ton Quay for some shop­ping.

Oh, but how’s this for bury­ing the lead – we actu­ally have a giveaway! So you too can have good times out­side of your own bed, you can win a one night stay at the Park Hotel in a Super­i­or Her­on Stu­dio, with two com­pli­ment­ary break­fasts at Ster­ling (val­id between 4 Decem­ber and 27 Janu­ary 2017). Fab!

All you have to do is leave us a com­ment telling us why you want to stay at the Park Hotel by 5pm Decem­ber 4. We’ll draw a win­ner at ran­dom (unless we decide that we abso­lutely love a story so much it has to win which we reserve the right to do).