Brutalist massing rendered in warm Queensland sandstone is not an obvious formula for hospitality, yet it is precisely the tension that Richards and Spence resolved when they designed The Calile Hotel for Brisbane's James Street precinct, which opened in 2018. The eight-storey building — its street-level arcade of generous rendered arches giving way to a grid of deep-set concrete fins and bronze-tinted glazing above — carries the formal weight of late modernism without the coldness that usually accompanies it. Richards and Spence drew the facade from a Mediterranean and North African register, the same sources that have always suited Queensland's subtropical light, and the golden hour photographs of the exterior confirm how precisely the palette was calibrated: the stone glows rather than bleaches. Inside, the 175 rooms were conceived by the same practice, each one a cave of pale blush plaster shaped by barrel-vaulted ceilings that fold down around the bed in a continuous plastered arch — an unmistakably tactile gesture that gives every room the atmosphere of a carved grotto rather than a hotel box. Cork-finish stone tiles line the lower walls and floors, brass tapware rises from a circular freestanding bath set on a terracotta-tiled plinth, and arched joinery niches frame arched windows beyond. The pool terrace, shaded by planted pergolas and surrounded by pale limestone paving, sage-green sun loungers, and cascading tropical planting, extends the sandy courtyard mood that makes this building feel closer to a Moroccan riad transplanted to subtropical Australia than anything the city had seen before.

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