There is a certain pleasure, available only to those who live here, in watching interstate visitors encounter COMO The Treasury for the first time. The slight recalibration in posture. The pause at the entrance to the former State Buildings on Cathedral Avenue. The quiet revision of whatever assumptions they arrived with about Perth and what it is capable of.

Perth has always known that it is remarkable. It has taken somewhat longer for the rest of Australia to agree.

COMO The Treasury is, for many visitors, the evidence. Housed within three mid-nineteenth century colonial buildings — the former Treasury, the former Lands and Titles Office, and the former General Post Office — the hotel was designed by the late Kerry Hill, the architect whose sensibility runs through some of the finest small luxury properties in the Asia-Pacific. The brief, as Hill understood it, was to honour 140 years of heritage while creating something that operated in the contemporary register without apology.

He achieved both.

The Building

From Cathedral Square, the State Buildings present as civic grandeur: soaring arches, stately white limestone columns, the confident scale of government architecture at the height of the colonial period. Inside, Hill stripped everything back to pale earth tones, creamy woods, and the natural light that floods through the original oversized windows.

The hotel has 48 rooms — deliberately, pointedly 48. This is not a hotel at which you are a room number. The corridors are quiet in the way that buildings with genuine thickness are quiet.

The Rooms

Even the smallest rooms at COMO The Treasury measure 55 square metres. This is not a coincidence. It is a statement about what the property understands a guest to deserve.

The Heritage Balcony Room is the one to request. It overlooks Cathedral Square, with its resident cathedral and the specific, unduplicated light of Perth’s western-facing sky, and it comes with a French-door balcony from which one might make a lordly speech to the good citizens of Perth.

The palette is Kerry Hill’s signature: bleached blond timber, warm stone, linen, the occasional grounding note of charcoal. The minibar is complimentary and replenished daily. The bathroom, in travertine with heated stone floors, German-engineered fittings and a freestanding oval bath, is exactly as serious as you would want it to be.

Dining

Two restaurants, a cocktail bar, and the secret that is Petition Kitchen next door.

Wildflower sits on the fourth floor with views across the Swan River, and it is run according to the six seasons of the Noongar people — Birak, Bunuru, Djeran, Makuru, Djilba, Kambarang — a structural decision that gives the menu both rigour and genuine surprise. Chef Jed Gerrard’s Wildflower is one of the finest dining rooms in Western Australia, full stop. Smoked kangaroo. Marron with saltbush and native lime. Shark Bay saucer scallops in sesame cream with fennel and apple. This is WA produce given a voice that is entirely and unapologetically its own.

Post, on the ground floor, operates in a more casual register: French-inflected bistro food with Australian ingredients.

COMO Shambhala Urban Escape

Hidden within the former treasury vaults — a detail of genuine architectural drama — the Shambhala spa offers treatments that carry the COMO philosophy forward from its Asia-Pacific resort origins into a CBD context without losing anything in translation. The 20-metre heated indoor pool, with its rooftop views, is the correct place to be at 7am on a Perth summer morning.

WLV Perspective

WLV Verdict: ★★★★★
Recommended Room: Heritage Balcony Room or Treasury Suite
Best For: Business travellers, Perth city stays, anyone who thinks they know Perth well

COMO The Treasury holds four Conde Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Awards and was named Australia’s Leading Boutique Hotel at the World Travel Awards 2024. Both accolades are correct. It is, on occasion, the hotel where a client realises, with some force, that they have been underestimating their own city.

To discuss how COMO The Treasury fits within a broader Western Australia itinerary curated for your travel style, contact Wanderlux Velari — hello@wanderluxvelari.com | +61 459 958 247