Every town has its landmarks. The buildings that define the skyline, the businesses that define the character, the people who become the stories that everyone tells. Katoomba has more than its share.
Two establishments, in particular, sit at the centre of the town's identity. One is a hotel that once called itself the finest in the Southern Hemisphere. The other is a cafe with Art Deco interiors, handmade chocolates, and alabaster friezes depicting Greek mythology. Between them, and around them, a cast of characters—builders, hoteliers, artists, migrants, cabbies, and festival founders—gave this small mountain town a personality far larger than its population.
The Carrington Hotel
The story of the Carrington Hotel is, in many ways, the story of Katoomba itself. The two were born at almost the same moment, and their fortunes have risen and fallen together for 140 years.
In 1881, when Frederick Clissold subdivided his 50 acres into the street grid that became modern Katoomba, construction began on a grand hotel at the highest point of land near the railway station. The builder was Harry Rowell, and the hotel opened in 1882 or 1883 (sources differ slightly on the exact year) as the Great Western Hotel, with 59 rooms.
Fifty-nine rooms. In a settlement that barely existed three years earlier. The ambition was extraordinary. Rowell and the investors behind the hotel were betting on the railway. They were betting that Sydney's wealthy would come to the mountains for their holidays, and that when they came, they would want accommodation that matched their expectations. The bet paid off.
In 1886, new owner F.C. Goyder renamed the hotel the Carrington, in honour of Lord Carrington, the Governor of New South Wales. Goyder also became Katoomba's first mayor, cementing the link between the hotel and the town's civic life. The Carrington was not just a place to stay. It was the centre of Katoomba's social, political, and cultural world.
By 1905, the hotel was advertising itself as "the largest and best known tourist hotel in the Southern Hemisphere." The claim was bold. Whether it was accurate is less certain. But the Carrington at its peak was genuinely grand: hundreds of rooms, extensive gardens, a ballroom, dining rooms that served multi-course meals to guests who dressed for dinner.
The Power Station and the Chimney
Around 1910, something remarkable happened behind the Carrington. A power station was built at the rear of the hotel, funded by James Joynton Smith, a media magnate and hotelier. The power station did not just supply the hotel. It provided Katoomba's first electricity.
Before the Carrington's power station, the town had been lit by kerosene lamps and candles. After it, electric light arrived, and the hotel was the source. The Carrington literally illuminated Katoomba.
The octagonal brick chimney from the power station still stands. It is the highest landmark in Katoomba, visible from across the town and from the valley below. When you look at the Katoomba skyline, the chimney is the first thing you see. It is a curious memorial: a piece of early industrial infrastructure, built for a hotel, that became the town's most recognisable silhouette.
Decline and Resurrection
The Carrington's decline mirrored Katoomba's. After the Second World War, as tourism shifted to the coast and overseas, the grand hotel lost patronage. By the 1970s, it was struggling. In 1985, it closed.
The closure of the Carrington was a body blow to Katoomba. The hotel had been the town's anchor for over a century. Its shuttered windows and empty ballroom became symbols of a broader malaise: a mountain town that had lost its purpose.
But the story did not end there. In 1991, restoration began. It was a painstaking, expensive, and occasionally contentious process. Restoring a 19th-century hotel to something approaching its former grandeur, while meeting modern building codes and commercial realities, is not a simple task. It took seven years.
The Carrington reopened in 1998. It was not quite what it had been: fewer rooms, different economics, a changed clientele. But it was open, and it was alive, and Katoomba had its anchor back. The hotel is now on the State Heritage Register, its significance formally recognised.
The Paragon Cafe
Three hundred metres from the Carrington, on Katoomba Street, sits a cafe that has been in continuous operation since 1916. It is one of the most celebrated historic cafes in Australia, and its interior is one of the finest Art Deco spaces outside of Sydney's CBD.
The Paragon was founded by Zacharias "Jack" Simos, a Greek migrant who arrived in Australia in the early twentieth century. Jack came to Katoomba and opened a cafe on the main street, selling coffee, cakes, and handmade chocolates. The business thrived.
In 1925, Jack commissioned a major interior redesign by Henry White, the architect responsible for Sydney's State Theatre on Market Street. White was one of the most talented theatrical and commercial architects of his era, and his work at the Paragon transformed a mountain-town cafe into something extraordinary.
The interior that White created is a journey through decorative styles. The main room features dark timber panelling, booths with leather seating, and a long counter displaying the house-made chocolates and confections. It is warm, enclosed, and intimate: a perfect mountain refuge.
But the real treasure is deeper inside. In 1934, the Aztec Odeon Banquet Hall was added, extending the cafe into a space that draws on Mesoamerican decorative motifs. The name alone is a clue to the eclecticism of the design: Aztec and Odeon, pre-Columbian and Art Deco, combined in a banquet hall in a Blue Mountains cafe.
Then, in 1946, sculptor Otto Sheen was commissioned to create a series of alabaster friezes depicting scenes from Greek mythology. These friezes, installed in the cafe's interior, are works of genuine artistry. They connect the Paragon to Jack Simos's Greek heritage, to the classical tradition, and to the broader story of European migration and cultural contribution that shaped Australian towns like Katoomba.
The Paragon was listed on the NSW State Heritage Register in 2015. It continues to serve coffee, meals, and its famous handmade chocolates.
Jack Simos and the Greek Connection
Jack Simos's story is a migration story, and it connects to a broader pattern in Australian hospitality. Greek migrants, arriving in Australia from the late 1800s onward, established cafes, milk bars, and fish-and-chip shops in towns and cities across the country. These businesses became community landmarks: the places where locals gathered, where travellers stopped, where the rhythms of small-town life played out over cups of coffee and slices of cake.
In Katoomba, the Greek influence extended beyond the Paragon. The Varipatis family, also Greek migrants, acquired a property on Lurline Street around 1940 and renamed it Kapsalie, after their hometown in Greece. Across the mountains, Greek families ran businesses that became part of the fabric of their communities.
Jack Simos and his family operated the Paragon for decades. The cafe is now in different hands, but the Simos legacy is embedded in every booth, every chocolate, and every alabaster frieze. It is a reminder that Katoomba's character was shaped not just by the Anglo-Australian establishment that built the hotels and subdivided the land, but by migrants who brought their own cultures, skills, and stories and wove them into the town.
Harry Peckman: The Cabby
Not all of Katoomba's characters built buildings or ran businesses. Some built reputations through sheer presence.
Harry Peckman was the most famous cabby in Katoomba during the golden age of guesthouse tourism. When visitors arrived at the station, Harry was there on the platform, ready to load their trunks and drive them to their guesthouse. He knew every establishment in town, every proprietress by name, and every shortcut through the streets.
In an era before online booking systems and GPS navigation, the station cabby was the first point of contact between a visitor and the town. Harry Peckman was, in effect, Katoomba's front desk. His manner, his knowledge, and his personality set the tone for the entire holiday. That he is remembered by name, decades after the era he served, tells you something about the impression he made.
The Festival Founders
Katoomba's modern revival owes much to its cultural events, and those events owe much to the individuals who started them.
In 1994, artist John Ellison suggested the idea of a winter festival for Katoomba. The town was in the doldrums. The Carrington had only recently begun its restoration. Tourism was at a low ebb. A festival, Ellison argued, could draw visitors in the off-season and give the community something to celebrate.
The first Winter Magic Festival attracted around 2,000 people. It was a modest affair: street performers, market stalls, music, and the kind of slightly chaotic community energy that characterises events run by enthusiasts rather than professionals.
By 2017, Winter Magic had grown to an estimated 50,000 attendees. It had become the signature cultural event of the Blue Mountains, an annual celebration that transforms Katoomba Street into a carnival of art, music, costume, and spectacle. Held on the winter solstice, it embraces the cold and the dark and turns them into an occasion.
Two years after Winter Magic launched, the Blue Mountains Music Festival (originally called the Folk Festival) began in 1996. Its first venues included the Clarendon on Lurline Street, the RSL Club, and Katoomba Public School. Like Winter Magic, it started small and grew, becoming one of the premier music festivals in New South Wales.
These events did more than bring visitors. They changed the town's sense of itself. Katoomba in the 1980s was a faded resort town with cheap rents and empty shops. Katoomba in the 2000s was an arts community, a festival town, a place where creative people wanted to live and work.
The Writers and Artists
Katoomba has long attracted writers and artists, drawn by the landscape, the light, the solitude, and, frankly, the affordable rents.
The most distinguished literary resident was Eleanor Dark, whose novels, including The Timeless Land (1941), are among the most important works of Australian historical fiction. Dark lived in Katoomba for decades and drew on the Blue Mountains landscape in her writing.
Varuna, The Writers' House, located in Katoomba, is Australia's premier residential writers' retreat. It was established in the home of Eleanor Dark and her husband, Dr Eric Dark, and has hosted hundreds of Australian writers in residence since its founding. The presence of Varuna gives Katoomba a continuing connection to Australian literature that few towns of its size can match.
The Character of the Town
What all of these people and places have in common is personality. Katoomba is not a bland town. It never has been. From the moment Harry Rowell decided to build a 59-room hotel in a settlement that did not yet have a street, Katoomba has attracted people who think big, act boldly, and leave their mark.
Jack Simos, the Greek migrant who commissioned Art Deco interiors for a mountain cafe. May Hudson, who built a Mediterranean villa on Lurline Street while her husband was at war. John Ellison, who looked at a struggling town and said, "Let's have a festival." The guesthouse women who fed and housed thousands of visitors a year with nothing but hard work and good sense.
These are not famous people, not by national standards. Most of them would not appear in an encyclopaedia. But they are the people who built a particular kind of town: eccentric, hospitable, ambitious, and deeply attached to its landscape.
That character persists. Walk through Katoomba today and you will feel it. The vintage shops and the crystal shops and the bookshops and the galleries. The cafes that serve good coffee and play interesting music. The street art on the laneways. The nod from a stranger on the footpath. The faint smell of eucalyptus that hangs in the air even on the main street.
Katoomba is a town with character because it was built by characters. The Paragon and the Carrington are their monuments: one a cafe, one a hotel, both extraordinary, both still standing, both still welcoming people through their doors.
Some things endure.
Stay in the heart of it. Our cottages on Lurline Street are a few minutes' walk from the Carrington, the Paragon, and the vibrant main street of Katoomba. Settle in, explore the town, and discover the characters and stories that make this place unlike anywhere else.
