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).