TRAVEL

A London-based company is making temporary housing more comfortable and hassle-free.

Your boss just told you that you might need to relocate to London for a few months to oversee a project. Not again, you moan.

As much as you like a change of scene, you dread the thought of staying in an impersonal hotel room for long periods of time. It just doesn’t feel like home. And the ridiculous cost involved is taking its toll on your company’s finances, which ultimately means a smaller bonus, and you don’t want that, do you?

In his role as a corporate solicitor and, later, as an investment banker, Guy Nixon spent much of the 1990s travelling around Asia and the US, often for months on end. It made him very aware of the limitations of hotel living. He longed for more privacy, space and comfort and a place in which his friends and family would be welcome to stay.

Unfortunately, there were very few temporary housing solutions available at the time, so Nixon decided to test the market’s appetite for temporary housing in 1997 by placing an advertisement in the New York Times, offering his own London apartment to business travellers while he was away on business himself. Within hours, he was inundated with enquiries from American business travellers.

That was how his company Go Native started in 1998.

A good deal: There are 62 stylish studio flats available for rent from as low as £85 per night.

“London’s position as one of the world’s most expensive cities has prompted many visitors to explore different ways of cutting the cost of their stay,” says the 46-year-old founder and CEO. “One option that has seen an increase in popularity is the use of alternative types of accommodation, such as serviced or leased apartments.”

Nixon says customers are attracted to apartments because they are available on more flexible terms than hotels or short-term lets.

“These properties are available for one day and up to a year; customers can specify the level of service required, whether it be a daily linen service or a weekly clean; properties can be quickly and easily identified and booked on the Go Native website; and there is no formal check-in process.”

Go Native has over 25,000 properties in their database, offering the largest network of serviced apartments across the UK, Europe, the Middle-East, Africa and India. Their clients include large corporations looking to house staff on a short-term basis, tourists, business travellers, graduates on training programmes, as well as parents of overseas students studying in London.

All of Go Native’s apartments are of three or four-star standard, come fully furnished and feature comfortable interiors complete with a private bathroom, fully-equipped kitchen and broadband and digital TV services.

Many of the buildings also feature free on-site laundry rooms, entertaining spaces and guest lounges with large plasma screen TVs.

Located across central London, the majority of units are studio and one-beds situated close to tube stations, shops and other conveniences, with larger two-bed units also available.

Because of lower overheads, this type of accommodation can offer significant savings for guests, with prices starting from just £59 a night as opposed to the London hotels, which rarely cost less than £160.

“With the current economic climate, our clients are invariably looking to make savings but also want hotel-quality accommodation in convenient locations with a degree of flexibility but with all the facilities of a home. These are things that Go Native offer as standard,” says Nixon.

“We deal with all sorts of requests, and I have personally been involved with sourcing properties suitable for people with disabilities, people travelling with pets and celebrities for whom security is paramount,” he adds.

Based on customer’s feedback, Go Native introduced eco ratings, a guest rating system and video tours of the properties to help the clients decide. Last summer, British Telecom was looking to house 30 MBA graduate interns in London for 12 weeks and wanted a low-cost, centrally located, comfortable housing solution.

Go Native sourced 30 apartments in one location that met all of the criteria and has now been retained as British Telecom’s accommodation provider for three years.

Guy Nixon

“The property was a large block of newly refurbished studio apartments close to West End. Our interns were delighted with the accommodation,” says Candy Jenkins, MBA recruitment manager, British Telecom. “Pricing was on target, the location was central and secure, the apartments met the expectations of our interns and the overall service was excellent.”

Eugenie Furniss, head of books, William Morris Endeavour talent agency, was also happy with Go Native’s services when he was looking to house three colleagues travelling to Abu Dhabi for four weeks who required space for friends and family, a secure location, easy accessibility and concierge, pool and fitness facilities.

“Go Native was quick to respond with solutions that met our criteria. They understood the market well and helped us negotiate highly flexible terms at competitive rates,” says Furniss.

Nixon expects exciting times for the serviced apartment industry in the next few years as the sector becomes better understood by potential users and institutions.

“I think we will see steady growth in the number and range of serviced apartments available across the country. As the largest agency in Europe, we find that most new operators want to place their properties in our network.”

He says that the response Go Native gets now is very similar to the response he first got with his own flat, but on a bigger scale.

“We housed over 6,500 guests in 2009 and achieved a 96% guest satisfaction rating. People are not always aware that there is an alternative to hotels but when they find out about serviced apartments, they rarely go back to staying in hotels.”

o For more information, visit www.gonative.com.

Sydney is once again hosting the biggest music and light festival in the southern hemisphere called Vivid Sydney.

Beginning May 27, the southern hemisphere will once again light up at night and the music will flow as Vivid Sydney, Australia’s grand festival of music and light, kicks off four weeks of revelry.

Billed as an annual “festival of light, music and ideas”, Vivid Australia is aimed at flooring Sydney-siders and visitors alike with sensory overload. The festival is designed to tap the city’s creative pulse and uses Sydney’s city centre as a living canvas, incorporating Macquarie Street, Circular Quay and Darling Harbour into the festivities.

Dining by Darling Harbour

Of course, the iconic Opera House will also once again be put to good use.

The Opera House’s roofs will serve as a canvas for spectacular colours and designs — all without a drop of paint desecrating its tiles, as the colours will be coming from lights projected onto the building as night falls. How’s that for dramatic but eco-friendly effect?

Last year’s inaugural Vivid Sydney festival saw some 200,000 people being drawn to The Rocks and Circular Quay, as Brian Eno presented his Lighting the Sails, a light show that came on every evening, bathing the Opera House in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of light. A spectacle to behold, the show was broadcast to nearly 200 countries and was seen by 60 million all over the world over the duration of the festival.

Eno said of his show: “I wanted to create a situation where you could experience some kind of surrender. When you stop being you and stop thinking about you and your particular life and existence; the laundry you forgot to pick up or the coffee you crave.”

“For a little while, I want you to surrender to something . . . even if it is inconsequential.”

This year, rocker Lou Reed and performance artist Laurie Anderson will take over from Eno, so the world is waiting with bated breath to see what the two will pull out of the hat.

While the Opera House is expected to provide the festival’s most vivid images, a host of other events and exhibitions is set to keep the festivities humming along nicely, as people are encouraged to watch and participate in musical performances and other cultural celebrations.

Vivid Sydney comes packaged in six segments: Vivid Live at Sydney Opera House, Macquarie Visions, Fire Water, Creative Sydney, X Media Lab and Song Summit.

Vivid Live (May 28-June 11)

A music festival with an edge, Vivid Live is held at the Sydney Opera House and highlighted by the lighting of the sails. It is being curated this year by two cultural heavyweights, legendary rock musician Lou Reed, founder of the Velvet Underground, and Laurie Anderson, who is known for her music, composition, poetry, filmmaking and audio-visual work.

Being a multi-media festival, it is expected to showcase ground-breaking film, theatre and visual arts. By the way, did I forget to mention that Grammy Award-winning singer Rickie Lee Jones is also scheduled to perform?

Vivid Live is held at the Sydney Opera House and highlighted by the lighting of the sails.

Fire Water (June 11-14)

Under normal circumstances, fire and water are two things that don’t mix but since this is a festival that is anything but ordinary, they do! Fire Water is a free show featuring flames, food and fire sculptures revolving around the voyage of the Sydney Cove, a ship sent from Calcutta to Sydney in 1796 by merchant Robert Campbell, of the Campbell Cove fame.

This contemporary reinterpretation is told from the perspective of an 11-year-old Indian-Australian girl, using live performances, pop-up sets, animation, You Tube-styled projection and multimedia to create a theatrical event of epic proportions.

The show includes a Bollywood-styled, song-and-dance performance featuring tall ships arriving in the midst of Deepavali celebrations.

The soundscape is by world famous tabla player Bobby Singh and multi-instrumentalist Shenzo Gregorio.

Macquarie Visions (May 27-June 20)

Macquarie Street, Sydney’s ceremonial thoroughfare, is transformed into a fantasyland with huge immersive light displays to celebrate the 200th anniversary of two visionary personalities, Governor Lachlan Macquarie and his wife Elizabeth.

Creative Sydney (June 5-13 June)

Creative Sydney gathers the luminaries of the creative industries from across the globe for some awe-inspiring exchange of ideas, debates, presentations and performances.

As one-third of Australia’s creative minds live in New South Wales and 82% live in metropolitan Sydney, the city is well equipped for this pow-wow, so get ready for some fireworks of the creative kind.

X Media Lab (June 18-20)

As the creative industries’ think-tank, XML provides a platform for the planet’s leading lights in the creative, business and technology fields to share ideas. It also helps local businesses to develop new, radical thinking in tough times.

XML has been held in 13 cities previously, and the theme for the Sydney edition is “Global Media Cultures”. It will link Australia’s media practitioners with their peers in global digital markets.

Song Summit (June 19-21)

Song Summit gathers talents of the music industry and spans all genres of music. The three-day conference is an invaluable network for songwriters, musicians, singers and those involved in the music industry.

There will be a nightly programme of shows and singing, so even those who are tone-deaf and can’t read a note, can enjoy it.

Shopping & nightlife (anytime)

When it comes to shopping, you will be spoiled rotten, regardless of whether you are into arty handicraft, designer gear or aboriginal art.

Sydney’s nightlife can also be as ritzy or decadent as you please, so now is the best time to sample the best and most riotous aspects of the city.

The Malaysian market is deemed so important that we even have our own Vivid Sydney website in collaboration with Malaysia Airlines! Check out vividsydney.com.my

A good reference book and walk around the city will help you to discern the shape and growth of Sydney from the settlement to the city it is today.

The people of Sydney are justly proud of the way their city has developed into one of the world’s most sought after places to visit.

Many cities have landmarks that are synonymous with their name, like New York with its Time Square and the grand old Empire State Building. But probably no metropolis has a more identifiable showpiece than the Sydney Opera House, a building so visible and so striking that one could hardly miss it.

An elegant cottage of the 1840s.

But talking of missing, I wonder if travellers to these shores realise that Sydney possesses a rich history of architecture.

Take a walk along Macquarie Street from Bennalong Point (after a browse around the Opera House, naturally) to Hyde Park, and much of that history unfolds before your eyes.

Although none of the buildings of the first settlement survive today, the architecture of Macquarie Street, plus the names of nearby streets, coves and parks — even the pattern of the nearby streets — can help one to understand the way the city developed so quickly from a pristine rocky landscape to an internationally renowned social centre, and all within 200 years.

The wonderful thing about architecture is that it is not hidden away in galleries or museums, so the sense of the past is very real.

Having a safe, deep harbour was what made this place irresistible to Captain Arthur Phillip, when in 1788 he unloaded 1,480 convicts, soldiers and officials at what is now called Circular Quay. Life was as hard as one could imagine in a hot unforgiving environment so strange to British sensibilities, but build these early settler had to, and build they did. Soon their tents were replaced by the roughest of structures.

An old government house.

However, the wattle and daub and cabbage tree huts, and even the first stone structures failed to withstand the Sydney weather for long. But with each successive generation of buildings replacing a previous one, or going up around it, the pathway between the patchwork of blocks eventually became the streets.

They are hardly the carefully planned and laid-out web one finds in Melbourne but ask any Sydney-sider which has more character.

Between 1820 and 1840, Sydney became a thriving whaling centre, and this brought even more colourful characters to what was now known as The Rocks. Hotels, inns and sly grog shops lined every street. The narrow roads and laneways became even more crammed with buildings but as the local sandstone was easy to cut and shape, the town was soon bristling with a forest of simple, plain Georgian-styled houses so common in England at the time.

The first stone to be quarried was softer and easier to work but easily eroded. Stone from lower down had the benefit of being tougher, and perhaps the homes and inns which survive today do so because of this, or perhaps it’s sheer luck?

More old buildings may have survived, but in 1910 Sydney had a bubonic plague scare and many were demolished as a consequence. Then in the 1920s, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, precursor of the Opera House, appeared as the face of Australia and whole streets were demolished in its wake.

Beside The Hero Of Waterloo in Windmill Street are two other magnificent survivors — an early inn, The Shipwright’s Arms, and a five-storey block of flats built for working men in 1910.

Today The Rocks has become a most acceptable place to live and many cottages have been lovingly restored. Georgian paned windows, dormer windows and delicate fanlights above doorways create a streetscape of infinite variety. Old warehouses have become galleries, restaurants and boutiques. Once again, The Rocks is buzzing with people from all over the world — and this time they weren’t compelled but chose to come.

The northern wing of the Rum Hospital.

The three-storey house at 39, Lower Fort Street was designed by John Verge. Convicts were usually servants in houses like this, and in this instance, a special retractable staircase was used to isolate the domestic staff from the rest of the house.

In 1810, Governor Macquarie had great plans for Sydney but was thwarted by the conservative English government who did not share his zeal. However, an early scheme of his resulted in a hospital with a barracks for surgeons. What remains today are those barracks.

Being a political animal by nature, and perhaps an opportunist — and how could you not be and survive in the colonies? — Macquarie did a deal with three businessmen to build the hospital in return for three years’ monopoly in the rum trade.

A rum deal indeed, you might say, but Sydney got its hospital, even if it was one where one was more likely to leave it dead than alive, or so they used to say.

The south wing of that hospital survives to this very day as it became the Mint in 1855. Ten million dollars worth of gold sovereigns were minted in the three years following the gold rushes in NSW and Victoria at the time.

Meanwhile, the eager-beaver Macquarie found he could not rely on the designs in the architecture book his wife had brought out from England, and so in 1814, he latched on to Francis Greenway, a man transported to the colonies for the crime of forgery.

Perhaps Macquarie recognised a fellow dynamo in Greenway, who was from a family of architects, stone masons and quarry-men — three trades desperately needed in the colonies.

Hyde Park Barracks was designed by Greenway in the traditional Georgian style and demonstrates his considerable skill. Nine hundred male convicts were housed in the Barracks. These men had previously had to fend for themselves, but the nightmare brawling, robbery and worse decreased markedly after the Barracks came into use.

On completion of this building, Greenway was granted a full pardon.

After “transportation” ceased in 1842, Mrs Caroline Chisholm took over the Barracks and turned it into an accommodation for single female immigrants.

A copy of old warehouses at The Rocks.

Just one of the more sophisticated ventures in this primitive time was Vaucluse House, which became the home of W. C. Wentworth in 1830. W. C. was the son of Darcy Wentworth, who was one of the Rum Hospital financiers and is famous for his crossing of the Blue Mountains to help open up the vast potential which lay beyond.

Perhaps more interesting is the fact that the first building on the site was a small stone cottage built by an eccentric Irishman — aren’t they all? — who had a phobia of black snakes. He dug a six-foot moat dug around the property and, for good measure, filled it with 150 tons of good Irish soil specially imported from home in biscuit barrels.

In case you’re wondering, apparently the moat worked, and he was never troubled by snakes again.

Who knows what Macquarie would make of the present day Sydney, but is it any wonder that it is such a thriving bustling place with its history of such dedicated and creative thinkers and doers? Take a wander around. There’s much more of the past to see than I have dipped into here.

Get yourself a taste of the past.