The Bonobo Trades Coastal Cliché for Brazilian Modernism Inside a Brutalist Byron Bay Shell.

Photography: Traianos Pakioufakis.

Photography: Traianos Pakioufakis.

Vintage Mario Bellini leather sofa and slatted timber coffee table sit beneath Amy Vidler’s fibreglass pendants. Photography: Sean Fennessy.

Reception desk sits below a salon-style hang of the extensive Australian artwork collection. Photography: Traianos Pakioufakis.

The curved banquette in the Lobby Lounge wraps a window bay that looks straight through to the central courtyard and Richards & Spence’s brick facade beyond. Photography: Traianos Pakioufakis.

Lobby Lounge details: reception desk, retail display cabinets, waiters’ station and banquette seating with integrated mood lighting. Photography: Traianos Pakioufakis.

Raes has spent three decades perfecting hospitality on a smaller scale at Wategos. The Bonobo is the brand’s first proper step into the centre of town: seventy-four hotel rooms and residences across three levels, an all-day lobby lounge, a rooftop pool, a wellness studio from Reset, and menswear from Byron-born label Atlas Homme anchoring the ground floor. It’s the biggest swing Raes has taken, and it needed a new home confident enough to carry it.

Located on Jonson Street, the three-level building comes from Brisbane-based architecture firm Richards & Spence, with a modernist brick facade that gives the street a softly brutalist edge rather than the usual beach-town white. Their key move is a central courtyard that pulls light, air, and greenery into the middle of the building—less a decorative gesture than what stops three levels of brick from feeling like a bunker.

Sydney- and Melbourne-based Manifold shaped the hotel’s shared spaces—lobby, bar, courtyard, rooftop—while Richards & Spence carried the interior design through to the private residences, with Birdy Catalano Interiors curating the furniture. It’s an unusual split for a project this size, and Manifold inherited a lot of the groundwork as incoming designers: the apartment interior architecture and key elements of the base build were already locked in before they arrived.

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View through to courtyard. Photography: Traianos Pakioufakis.

Established palms softening the scale of the brick block by Richards & Spence, with the building’s perforated brick screen catching the last light of the day. Photography: Sean Fennessy.

Photography: Sean Fennessy.

Rooftop pool. Photography: Traianos Pakioufakis.

Inside one of the private residences, where the interior design shifts to Richards & Spence, working with Birdy Catalano Interiors on furniture and dressing. Photography: Sean Fennessy.

A residence ensuite and terrace by Richards & Spence. Photography: Sean Fennessy.

Interior mood shift courtesy of Manifold. A chain-hung print above the mirrored wall is a detail close to our hearts. Photography: Traianos Pakioufakis.

“The challenge was to develop a distinct character for the shared spaces while making the whole property feel connected,” say Manifold’s Lachlan Cooper and Morgan Novy, describing close coordination with the client, developer and builder to work out what was fixed and where they had room to move. They concentrated on what guests experience most directly—joinery, furniture, lighting, textiles, artwork—layering warmth into the lobby and bar while threading details back through to the residences, so a project that evolved through several hands and stages would still read as one coherent place.

That layering starts with a decision to skip the coastal shorthand entirely. “Brazilian modernism gave us a way to work with the weight of the concrete while bringing warmth, colour and softness. That felt right for Byron’s subtropical setting,” Cooper and Novy explain. “We wanted to move beyond the uniformly pale coastal palette, so we brought in wire-brushed timber, joinery conceived as furniture, and flashes of colour drawn from a surfboard we spotted in Byron. Those elements create a relaxed, informal atmosphere where people feel comfortable.”

The lobby carries that decision furthest. Mark Tuckey stools and a Percival Lafer coffee table (vintage Brazil) sit on a Beni Ourain mat, making the lobby feel more like someone’s very good living room. Vintage pieces—a Mario Bellini leather lounge chair, an Umberto Riva table lamp, a Gaetano Pesce resin vase—sit alongside custom joinery in stainless steel and aniline leather, while an extensive collection of Australian artwork, from Doris Bush to Wawiriya Burton to Rosie Tarku King, threads a local voice through all the imported references.

Cooper and Novy point to the lobby and bar as the project’s proudest moment—“a satisfying balance between the substantial concrete structure and the more expressive elements: the curved banquette, translucent fibreglass lights, textured timber and pops of chartreuse”—with custom pieces handling proportion and function and vintage furniture supplying, in their words, “a less predictable character.” It would be easy for a collection this eclectic to read as showroom clutter. It doesn’t, and the studio is candid about why: “there is a lot of careful coordination behind that apparent ease.”

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Manifold’s curved stainless steel bar and dining tables, doubled by a mirrored ceiling that catches the gallery wall of artwork above. Photography: Sean Fennessy.

Photography: Traianos Pakioufakis.

Details of timber screens, dining tables, bar counter, open shelving, pendant lights and artwork. Photography: Traianos Pakioufakis.

Back in the lobby lounge, with a rolling bookshelf of design titles, lighting and objects, and large indoor plants. Chef’s kiss. Photography: Traianos Pakioufakis.

Exterior night view of the lobby lounge. Photography: Traianos Pakioufakis.

One of the circular skylights viewed from above, the lounge’s pendant lights reflected in the glass. Photography: Traianos Pakioufakis.

The sequencing matters as much as the objects. Lobby and bar are pitched as social anchors—flexible, layered, loud enough for a Friday night but calm enough for a laptop on a Tuesday morning—and pointedly not roped off for hotel guests only. Move further in, and the volume drops: materials soften, lighting dims, Fiam armchairs and custom umbrellas fill the courtyard, and the rooftop pool delivers the view everyone came for, lighthouse included.

The best evidence of that coordination is easy to miss. Every apartment has its own set of vintage hooks, sourced individually from around the world—more than 300 in total, by the studio’s count—so each residence carries its own small point of difference. The same instinct runs through the lighting, art and fixtures throughout, much of it vintage or second-hand, with the bulk of the original artwork deliberately Australian—a local counterweight to all that imported, well-travelled sourcing.

Luxury here isn’t the marble-and-gold kind—it’s craftsmanship, comfort, and a material language of plaster, stone, timber and aged metal that holds the whole thing together even as the objects within it get stranger and more specific. Byron Bay doesn’t lack for places selling a view. What Richards & Spence and Manifold have built together at The Bonobo is the harder sell: a room worth staying in long after the sunset’s done its job.

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[Images courtesy of Manifold and The Bonobo. Photography by Traianos Pakioufakis and Sean Fennessy.]