Hybrid hotel and hostel for former Sol Square building
A new type of guest accommodation will launch in Christchurch this year, inside a heritage building unused since the earthquakes.
Called Drifter Christchurch, the hotel-hostel hybrid concept will offer accommodation ranging from a $70-a-night bed in a bunkroom, to a $330-a-night loft suite.
The Drifter Group’s first two locations will be Byron Bay in Australia as well as Christchurch. Others across Australia and New Zealand are to follow next year.
Drifter Christchurch will have 95 rooms, a bar, dining area, meeting rooms and working spaces, and food and drink outlets.
It is due to open in June.
The location will be the marble-fronted heritage building at 96 Lichfield St in the central city.
Built as the Wellington Woollen Mills building in 1919, it was part of property developer Dave Henderson’s Sol Square complex before the earthquakes, housing Minx restaurant and a budget accommodation lodge.
The heritage-listed building was designed by William Gummer, who was also one of the architects behind Christchurch’s Bridge of Remembrance.
Henderson’s company Lichfield Ventures went into liquidation in 2010, before the building suffered earthquake damage.
The building was bought in 2018 by Wool House Investments Ltd, headed by investor Liz Harris and her daughter Jenna Dwan.
They repaired and restored the building with the help of a $600,000 city council heritage grant. The work involved sourcing matching Takaka marble to fix the façade.
Wool House Investments sold the building in 2023 to Drifter Christchurch Pty Ltd, along with a parking area alongside.
Drifter, part of the Melbourne-based Leisure Accommodation Collective, was founded by Hugh Stephenson, Joshua Hunt and Ryan Sanders.
Christchurch-born Sanders also founded Haka Tourism Group, while Stephenson and Hunt are Sydney-based businessmen.
Hunt described their accommodation model as bringing together “the best of hotel and hostel features”.
Aimed at “the young and young at heart”, it will have a “design-centric aesthetic” and offer guests experiences including music, art and culture, he said.
“Drifter Christchurch and Drifter Byron Bay are the first version of this concept and we‘re really looking forward to opening our doors for travellers to share in the experience of them soon.”
A Government-appointed expert panel has recommended New Zealand adopt a politically contentious sanctions law that Foreign Minister Winston Peters is wary of.
The report on ways to expand New Zealand’s diplomatic “toolkit”, written by experts appointed by former foreign minister Nanaia Mahuta, was published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade on Monday.
Peters has expressed a lack of enthusiasm for a major recommendation of the report – that the Government should legislate an “autonomous sanctions” law that would allow New Zealand to level sanctions against countries outside of a United Nations sanctions regime, if Parliament agrees to the move.
“It has an attraction until you realise how it could cause enormous delay and enormous amount of work, when everybody starts screaming out for a sanction they want, on a cause that they’re in love with and nobody else is,” Peters said.
He said “there’s no doubt” that New Zealand could come under pressure from partner nations to apply certain sanctions if it had such a law.
New Zealand does not have an autonomous sanctions law, as some partner nations including Australia do, that would allow it to undertake “unilateral” sanctions in circumstances where a contested UN Security Council blocks the UN process from doing so. The only occasion New Zealand has passed a law to do this was against Russia in 2022 for its invasion of Ukraine.
Prior governments have expressed a wariness about taking unilateral sanctions actions outside of the UN, and there has been concern that New Zealand might feel pressured into acting against its interests if it did – such as applying sanctions to its largest trading partner, China, as countries like the United States have done.
The National Party, prior to entering government, advocated for an autonomous sanctions law, but since forming a coalition with ACT and NZ First it has not pursued this policy.
“It looks superficially attractive. We have looked at it and we’re still considering it, but we’ve not made a decision yet,” Peters said.
A previous attempt to legislate an autonomous sanctions regime was quashed by the prior Labour government, but then-foreign minister Mahuta sought advice to expand New Zealand’s diplomatic “toolkit” to respond to issues such as human rights abuses abroad.
The report was written by an advisory group made up of former New Zealand representative to the UN Colin Keating, former human rights commissioner Rosslyn Noonan, director of Victoria University’s Centre for Strategic Studies David Capie, and solicitor and UN representative Valmaine Toki.
The experts outlined ways the Government could a take a more “proactive, preventive approach” to responding to serious human rights abuses abroad, before using a “carefully limited” sanctions law that would only be triggered by Parliament – not just the Government – as a last resort.
Peters on Tuesday said he had yet to consider the report.
“We will consider it in the fullness of time, but we’re flat out at the moment trying to organise overseas trips.”