This boutique Melbourne hotel was just honoured with a major style and design award
Hands up if the name La Liste rings a bell? You may recognise it as the Paris-based restaurant ranking guide that unveils an annual list of its top 1,000 restaurants – last year, it crowned Melbourne's very own fine diner Vue de Monde as the best restaurant in Australia (and fifth in the whole world). Now La Liste is back with a hotly anticipated 2025 guide to the most outstanding hotels around the globe. And you may be surprised to hear that a new boutique accommodation in Fitzroy has been awarded a very special accolade.
The StandardX – an uber-cool, industrial-style venue that we reviewed in November 2024 – is among just five hotels to receive the prestigious Style and Design Award. These are hotels that have been either "launched or refurbished with outstanding design". La Liste called the StandardX "arty, bold and unfiltered", and it shared the honour with Maison Heler Metz in France, ÖÖD Hekla Horizon in Iceland, Reschio Hotel in Italy and Ulaman Eco Luxury Resort in Indonesia.
The hotel only opened in August 2024, and is the first StandardX iteration from famed hotel chain the Standard. Described as "the rebellious younger sibling", it boasts 125 rooms over eight floors, as well as an all-day Thai street food-inspired restaurant called Bang, a rooftop bar with panoramic city views and a retail offering. Led by Melbourne-based interior design firm Hecker Guthrie, the styling elements blend the grittiness of Fitzroy with modern comforts – think rustic finishes, plenty of greenery, caramel leather couches and an epic red revolving front door.
"It's bougie, for sure, but still artsy enough to feel like it belongs to the northside," says Time Out Melbourne's food and drink writer, Lauren Dinse. "The designers have taken inspiration from Fitzroy's post-punk 'Little Band' scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, paying homage to its music venues, street art and café culture – historic pulse points of this vibrant 'hood."
The full list of 1,000 hotels included properties from Paris, London and Bangkok. This year, the ten spots to share the top gong with a near-perfect score of 99.5 include:
La Réserve Paris, France
The Connaught and The Savoy, England
Il San Pietro di Positano, Italy
Cheval Blanc Paris, France
J.K. Place Capri, Italy
Mandarin Oriental Bangkok, Thailand
The Peninsula Shanghai, China
The Peninsula Chicago, USA
Rosewood Mayakoba, Mexico
To find out more, read the full list here.
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