PAINTING THE TOWN

Family affair

For ANNA SOLOMON, keeping things en famille has meant enviable access to some of our best local creative talent.

By ELLE MCCLURE

A world away from the decorum of a seven-course dining menu at Aria on

Sydney Harbour, Anna Solomon cut her teeth in the Channel 10 newsroom as assistant chief-of-staff — until it nearly broke her. “It was a very intense place to work,” she says, and after a particularly harrowing week, her boyfriend at the time found her shut in the wardrobe, crying. “I knew I had to reconsider, and I’d always wanted to work with Dad.”

Working with Dad in this case meant stepping into an illustrious family hospitality business, Solotel, founded by Anna’s third-generation publican father, Bruce, in 1986; Anna’s brother, Elliot, is a company director. Solomon’s father quickly tapped her keen design eye, tasking her with bringing new life to Sydney watering hole The Golden Sheaf, in Double Bay, in the wake of a 2008 fire. When the space, a collaboration with Tzannes architects, received glowing praise in a review (“I’m paraphrasing, but it was something like,