The restaurant and bar is named after the ship the Emily Taylor, an East India Company trader on the spice routes (relating to the pan Asian themed food served in the venue) that sunk in South Bay Fremantle 1821. The ship name came from the wife of the ships owner Robert Taylor, and this was the prompt for our commissioned artist Ms Tessa MacKay to imagine her portrait of the central mural, and the 11 individual portraits in each of the hotel rooms.

The rich nautical heritage of the port city was the prompt for the main structure of the restaurant which strongly references the trussed warehouses that held the goods that needed to be stored in the days before containerisation. The trusses also reference the history of the site by following the old fence lines between each of the cottages, further enhanced by the jarrah inlays located on the same lines but in the floor. The face bricks that line the walls of the restaurant are imported from China and represent the ballast ships carried and the bamboo embossed soffits of the concrete awning demarcating the transition between inside and outside reference the trade routes and the exotic plants and links to trade between east and west.

The large architectural move on the site was to carve away the building from the northern part of the site to create the garden area and maintain the visual connection and setting values between the prison and the rear of the cottages.