Beer Adelaide

SPENCER HOTEL

The Spencer Hotel was the second hotel built in the fast-growing town of Whyalla, opening its doors on 20 November 1939. Breaking away from the traditional architectural styles of South Australian hotels, it was designed in a bold early Modernist style by architect C.A. Fisher and constructed by the Frickers Company.

Owned by publicans William Byrnes and Dennis O’Leary, who also operated the Halfway Hotel on Port Road at Beverley, the £20,000 Spencer Hotel was hailed as “the most modern hotel in South Australia” upon completion in August 1939, just a month before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Architecturally, the Spencer Hotel stands as one of the state’s earliest examples of modernist design with subtle Art Deco influences. Built of local stone and finished in cement stucco, the hotel’s foundations were designed to support an additional storey if expansion was ever needed. Inside, the hotel featured 26 bedrooms and an impressive 80-foot-long bar, faced with ceramic tiles. Decorative reliefs in pressed cement added life to the otherwise austere exterior, depicting scenes symbolic of Whyalla’s steel industry, a fitting tribute to the town’s industrial roots.

Few South Australian hotels were constructed entirely in the Art Deco style. However, during the 1920s and 1930s, many older hotels underwent renovations to achieve a similar look. Elaborate Victorian façades were often covered with simple, buff-coloured renders and streamlined horizontal details to reflect the new Modernist aesthetic of restraint and simplicity.

The Spencer Hotel remains a rare and important example of this transitional period in South Australian architecture, where function met formality, and the optimism of modern design arrived on the edge of a working-class steel town.

Source
Twentieth Century Heritage Survey,
Stage Two 1928-1945
Volume Two
Report to Department for Environment and Heritage

Hotel Picture