Roomer

“Someone has left a single high heel in the elevator, silver, pointing toward the doors like it knows where it's going.”

Currie Street at six in the evening is doing that thing Adelaide does where it pretends to be winding down but is actually just changing shifts. The office crowd thins out past the tram stop, a couple of guys in hi-vis are ordering banh mi from a shop I can't see the name of, and there's a busker on the corner of King William playing something that might be Jeff Buckley or might be his own stuff — either way, he's committed. I'm dragging a suitcase over uneven pavement, dodging a woman walking three whippets in matching coats, and the hotel entrance almost slips past me. The Sofitel doesn't announce itself from the street the way you'd expect. It sits flush with the block, glass and stone, more corporate confidence than grand gesture. You find it by looking up.

Inside, the lobby smells faintly of something botanical — not aggressive, not trying to brand itself as a scent experience, just present. The check-in is fast and French-inflected, which is the Sofitel thing, and the woman behind the desk tells me the pool closes at nine but the sauna stays open until ten. She says this like she's handing me a secret, though it's printed on a card she then hands me.

The room with no walls (sort of)

The room is the thing here. Not because it's large — though it is — but because of a design decision that either thrills you or horrifies you depending on your relationship status and your feelings about privacy. The bathtub is in the bedroom. Not adjacent to the bedroom, not behind a frosted partition. It is in the bedroom, separated by a glass panel that hides approximately nothing. You could lie in the bath and watch whatever's on the television, or you could lie in bed and watch someone lie in the bath. It's a layout that assumes a certain comfort level between guests. I find it genuinely delightful. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

The bed itself is excellent — firm in the European way, not the sinking American way — and the linens are heavy and cool. There's a Nespresso machine on the desk that I use three times before breakfast. The bathroom proper, beyond the glass bathtub spectacle, has a rainfall shower with pressure that borders on therapeutic and a mirror that fogs from the bottom up, which means you can always see your face even when the room is full of steam. Someone thought about that. The toiletries are Hermès, which tracks for the brand, and they smell like a garden in a country where it rains more than here.

What the Sofitel gets right about Adelaide is proximity without noise. You're a seven-minute walk from the Central Market — the real one, where stallholders have been selling cheese and dried fruits and improbable quantities of olives since 1869. Rundle Mall is ten minutes the other direction. The tram runs along King William Street, one block east, and it's free within the city loop, which remains one of Adelaide's best-kept non-secrets. But Currie Street itself is quieter than you'd expect for a CBD address. At night, the block goes genuinely still. I sleep with the curtains open and the city lights are soft and distant, not the pulsing neon of bigger towns.

“Adelaide doesn't hustle you. It just leaves the door open and assumes you'll wander in eventually.”

The pool is on a lower level, tiled in dark stone, and glamorous is the right word even if I'd normally resist it. It's small enough that two people swimming laps would need to negotiate, but the lighting is low and the water is warm and at eight-thirty on a Tuesday night I have it entirely to myself. The sauna next door seats maybe four and smells like eucalyptus and cedar. I stay too long and walk back to the elevator light-headed and perfectly content.

The honest thing: the hallway carpets absorb sound so completely that the corridors feel almost unnervingly silent, like a library after hours. And the minibar is priced the way hotel minibars are priced, which is to say you should walk two minutes to the bottle shop on Grote Street instead. The Wi-Fi holds steady, though — I run a video call from bed without a single dropout, which in my experience puts it ahead of hotels charging twice as much.

I never figure out who left the silver shoe in the elevator. It's gone by morning, replaced by a room service tray with a half-eaten croissant and a lipstick-marked coffee cup. The elevator tells better stories than most hotel lobbies.

Walking out onto a different street

Currie Street at seven in the morning is a different animal. The banh mi place is closed but a café called Hey Jupiter on Ebenezer Place — a laneway just south — is already pulling espresso, and the queue is all locals in running gear and nurses coming off night shift. The tram rattles past on King William and the light is that particular South Australian gold that makes sandstone glow. I notice things I missed arriving: a mural of a cockatoo on a side wall, a bookshop I'll never get to visit, the way the breeze carries something sweet from the direction of the Market. Adelaide doesn't grab your sleeve. It just stands there looking good until you pay attention.

Rooms start around USD 200 a night, which buys you that bathtub-in-the-bedroom situation, the Hermès soap, and a location where you can walk to almost anything worth doing in the city without ever needing a rideshare. The free tram loop handles the rest.