No room at the inn: The Fitzroy hotel that always refused sports fans

Throughout the dozen or so years of its operation, the Brooklyn Arts Hotel had one overarching rule: no sports fans.

“My line was people interested in the arts,” says Maggie Fooke, who owned and ran the nine-room boutique hotel on George Street, Fitzroy. “You could be a participant or an observer or contributor. But if people said ‘we’re here for the footy’ we’d say, ‘sorry, we’re booked out’. Grand Prix, no. Horse races, no.”

The tennis, though, “was a borderline one”.

Because you like the sport? “No, not particularly. But it’s not as offensive as the others.”

Fooke, 74, is as singular as her hotel was. She has been an architect, a landscape architect, a university lecturer, an animator and a filmmaker – her short Pleasure Domes was, in 1988, the first Australian animation invited to compete at Cannes – as well as a hotelier. Since selling the Brooklyn in 2020 (the deal settled the week before Australia first went into lockdown) she has relocated her salon to the Northern Arts Hotel in Castlemaine.

The woman, and the place she ran, is the subject of To Thank the Room, which was recently voted best Melbourne documentary at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival and is now screening at Cinema Nova. It captures the last 100 days of the Brooklyn Art Hotel, and the sometimes-chaotic life within.

Initially, Fooke planned to make the movie herself. She bought a camera, sent an email to friends and past guests inviting them to get involved, and started planning a series of art events to mark the hotel’s passing.

Among those who responded was Belinda Lloyd, a neighbour and health worker who had studied filmmaking at RMIT.

“I was a bit starstruck, and I was keen, so I said I’d like to be a coffee runner or help in whatever way I could,” says Lloyd.

“And she realised quite quickly that I was way past my capacity to film the end of the thing,” says Fooke, “and we bought another camera, we had two the same, and worked together in the beginning, and as time went by I worked less and you worked more.”

Lloyd is credited as the director of To Thank the Room, Fooke as producer. But clearly, it was a collaboration – and still is.

As we’re chatting at a cafe on Gertrude Street, Fooke reveals there’s a whole bunch of footage she shot before Lloyd came on board.

“I’ve never given you this stuff,” she says.

“I’m not recutting it now,” jokes Lloyd. Who was the boss on set? I ask.

“We gave and took,” says Lloyd. “It was a strong dynamic. We had one barney.” Only one? That’s pretty good.

“Yeah, I’m pretty patient.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” quips Fooke.

The Brooklyn is a private residence now, extensively renovated by its cashed-up owner since the sale. “It needed lots of work,” Fooke concedes.

She originally bought the building with a friend, intending it to be a private home for them and their kids (Fooke has a daughter, Aphrodite, who features in the film). But when the friend decided she needed more space for her and her two children, Fooke bought her out.

Though the hotel was born of necessity as she faced a massive mortgage on her own, it was also an opportunity to bring to life a dream of a way of being, a space for people to talk art, ideas, politics, culture. The big communal table where guests ate breakfast together was the focal point, the rooms decked out in op-shop wares set the tone.

It wasn’t just a building or a business, she says. “It was a way of life.”

But she doesn’t mourn its passing. “I did my grieving before, during and not after. I haven’t really missed the hotel since, because I know it didn’t exist any more.”

Besides, the place in Castlemaine is bigger, in better condition, with a larger communal area where she can host events – “we have music, we show films, people meet there; it’s able to do things I couldn’t do at Brooklyn”.

In a sense, the film marks the passing not just of a space, but of the Fitzroy of old as well.

“I miss the rundown genuineness of it,” Fooke says of the suburb in which she had lived for decades even before Brooklyn. “Somehow it feels artificial now. Pretentious – that’s what it feels like.

“People are trying too hard to be something, I don’t understand what,” she adds. “I wish people weren’t so preoccupied with appearance and looks and all that. I’m sorry that’s the case.”

To Thank the Room screens at Cinema Nova August 9-14 and August 17-18.

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