Canberra is officially cool. The New York Times says so.

Posted on 6 June, 2014

It’s official. Canberra is cool. The New York Times says so…and it’s not the only one.

The last couple of weeks has seen a veritable flurry of activity in the ‘pro-Canberra’ camp.

Hotel Hotel was awarded Best Boutique City Hotel at Gourmet Traveller’s inaugural Australian Hotel Guide Awards (with East Hotel and the Diamant Hotel Canberra also included in the top 50 hotels in Australia).

The magazine praised Hotel Hotel creators, brothers Nectar and Johnathan Efkarpidis, for ‘remind[ing] us how thrillingly unique a character hotel can be’, saying the hotel was ‘so intriguingly layered with ideas, artworks and objects that guests are left gaping in wonder’.

But wait, there’s more. In the same June edition of Gourmet Traveller, Canberra’s praises were sung over eleven glorious pages, with the cover asking whether it could be ‘Australia’s coolest capital’. Written by Pat Nourse, who grew up in Canberra, and who ‘know[s] its secrets and its magic’, the article is a love letter to the city.

“Picture, if you will, a city that’s a magnet for artists and craftspeople, athletes and intellectuals. A city crammed with cultural institutions, its jumble of Deco and Modernist buildings housing the corridors of power, but also a city interlaced with parks and bushlands, rows of stately oaks and poplars and thickets of dense wilderness. A city that’s home to the greenest building in Australia, a building that’s also quite possibly the coolest hotel in the land. A town where readers and riders rule, a town surrounded by vineyards and farmland. That city exists and it belongs to you. That city is Canberra.”

And now today, The New York Times has taken its readers on its 36 hour journey around the Capital region, in an article that shouts from the rooftops what we’ve been saying all along – Canberra is cool.

“To stand atop a Canberra hilltop is to contemplate the stark charm of the Australian bush: vast grassy fields, swaths of eucalyptus forest and Instagram-worthy sunsets. This outpost is Australia’s national capital — not, as is commonly thought, the glitzier city of Sydney, three hours’ drive north. In Canberra, there are no beaches or iconic opera houses, and European chic is best sought an hour’s flight away in Melbourne. But what the “bush capital” lacks in big-city tousle, it makes up for in big-sky beauty, breezy civic pride and a decidedly hipster underbelly.”

Do you feel it? Can you feel that invisible momentum, that thrum of excitement that is coursing through Canberra’s veins at the moment? We all know how great this city is – and now, it seems, others agree with us. How powerful is it to see our town through other’s eyes!?

Now, I’m off to enjoy all the gems in these articles before we’re swamped with tourists.