Inside the Hydro Majestic Blue Mountains Hotel – once host to legendary parties, now home to heritage luxury

Hydro? Will we be taking the waters? No, although the hotel’s original owner, department store magnate Mark Foy, persuaded the Blue Mountains town of Medlow to change its name to Medlow Bath to attract custom for his new Hydropathic Establishment, opened in 1904.

Well-travelled Foy was an enthusiast for health and fitness and wanted to bring to Australia the sort of spa facilities he enjoyed in Europe and America. He offered treatments of many kinds, including mustard cloths and warm enemas as well as vapour baths and fomentations “as hot as can be borne”, all supervised by a severe Swiss physician.

That doesn’t sound much fun. Agreed. The fashion for hydrotherapy was already fading and, within a few years, the sanatorium, with its strict diets and general restraint, was reinvented as a luxury hotel, with nine-course banquets, free-flowing champagne and a new name, the Hydro Majestic. Fun was back on the menu.

Recent renovations stripped away a century of overlays to reveal the hotel much as Foy created it, with 85 not overly large but comfortable rooms. It now luxuri­ates in its reputation as one of the few Australian hotels that is a historic desti­nation in its own right, although you might also come for the views from its escarp­ment top down into the vast bowl of the Megalong Valley, which has thus far escaped the bush fires that have brought destruction to other parts of Australia.

What’s so special about it? Foy bought and connected three neighbouring properties on the edge of a broad escarp­ment: rebuilding after fires and later additions gave it a lengthy frontage with spectacular views over a sea of feathery eucalyptus. No expense was spared on the interior, including Chinese ceramics and specially commissioned artworks. The dome over the casino entrance, modelled on one Foy had seen in Chicago, was constructed in the US, then dismantled and shipped out.