“There's a man on the corner of Victoria and Springfield selling bunches of native flowers out of a shopping trolley, and he waves at every single car.”

You come up from Kings Cross station and the neighbourhood announces itself in layers. First the backpacker bars with their sticky floors and Tuesday drink specials, then the strip clubs with their neon turned off in daylight, and then — almost without transition — the footpath tables of Potts Point proper, where someone is drinking a flat white next to a greyhound wearing a knitted coat. Victoria Street runs uphill from here, lined with plane trees and apartment blocks that look like they've been arguing about heritage listings since the 1970s. The Holiday Inn sits about halfway up, on the left, between a Thai restaurant and a bottle shop. You could walk past it twice without noticing. That's not a criticism.

The kids notice the revolving door before anything else. This is the kind of detail that matters when you're six. They spin through it three times while you deal with check-in, which takes about four minutes and involves a woman named Priya who draws a little map of the area on a Post-it note and circles the playground at Fitzroy Gardens. That Post-it note turns out to be the single most useful thing anyone hands you all weekend.

The room that earns its view

The room is on a high floor, and the first thing you do is pull back the curtains like you're revealing a magic trick to a five-year-old. It works. Sydney Harbour is right there — not a sliver of it between buildings, but the whole sprawling thing, with the bridge and the opera house and ferries drawing white lines across the water. The kids press their faces against the glass and leave smudge marks that catch the afternoon light. You leave them there.

The room itself is Holiday Inn standard, which means it's clean and beige and everything works. Two queen beds, a minibar you'll ignore, a TV the children will not ignore. The air conditioning hums at a frequency that's either soothing or maddening depending on your tolerance — by the second night it becomes white noise. The bathroom has decent water pressure and those tiny shampoo bottles that kids treat like treasures. There's a safe you won't use and an iron you definitely won't use. The carpet has that particular hotel-carpet softness that makes you want to walk around barefoot even though you know, intellectually, you probably shouldn't.

What the hotel gets right is the stuff that actually matters when you're travelling with small humans. Free parking in the basement — and if you've ever tried to park near Kings Cross on a Saturday, you understand that this alone might be worth the booking. Breakfast is included, served in a ground-floor restaurant where the buffet has the usual suspects: scrambled eggs, bacon, cereal, fruit, and a waffle station that will become the emotional centre of your children's weekend. There's also congee, which is warm and good and means you can eat something that isn't designed for a six-year-old's palate.

“Potts Point is the kind of neighbourhood where you can get excellent pho and a vintage lamp within the same block, and nobody thinks that's unusual.”

Step outside and Potts Point does what Potts Point does. Mano Espresso on the corner of Macleay Street pulls a long black that's worth the five-minute walk. The Butler, a few doors down, has a courtyard that feels like someone's backyard — order the cheeseburger spring rolls if they're on. For dinner, Cho Cho San on Macleay does Japanese with a queue that moves fast. The kids won't care about any of this. The kids will care about Fitzroy Gardens, which is a three-minute walk downhill and has a playground with a rope climbing structure that will occupy them for an hour while you sit on a bench and stare at a Moreton Bay fig tree that's older than the country.

The honest thing: the walls are thin enough that you can hear the couple next door discussing where to have dinner. You'll learn they chose Italian. The elevators are slow during checkout hour on Sunday — budget an extra ten minutes. And the lobby has a faint cleaning-product smell that's not unpleasant but is unmistakably institutional. None of this matters much. You're not here for the lobby. You're here because the harbour is outside the window and the playground is down the hill and nobody has to feed a parking meter.

Walking back down the hill

On the way out, Victoria Street looks different than it did on arrival. You notice the Art Deco details on the apartment buildings — the curved balconies, the geometric railings — that you walked straight past on Friday. A woman is watering a fern on a third-floor balcony and the water is dripping onto the awning of the Thai place below, making a sound like a slow clock. The flower-trolley man is gone. The greyhound in the knitted coat is back, or maybe it's a different greyhound. The 311 bus to Railway Square stops right on Victoria Street if you don't feel like dragging luggage downhill to the station. It runs every twelve minutes on weekdays.

A standard room with harbour views starts around US$156 a night, breakfast and parking included — which, once you subtract what parking alone would cost you in this part of Sydney, starts to feel like the maths is working in your favour.