Adelaide’s historic ‘Monkey House’ pub set for auction after 49 years
There’ll be no monkeying around when a cherished Adelaide hotel with a primate connection goes up for auction next month.
The Lord Exmouth Hotel in suburban Exeter is being offered to the market for the first time in 49 years, presenting an opportunity for a savvy operator to re-invigorate the ageing asset.
Constructed in the late 1800s, the pub soon became a favoured watering hole of maritime workers who would visit when their ships docked in Port Adelaide.
As was the fashion of the day, many of those sailors sat at the bar with pet squirrel monkeys perched on their shoulders, earning the hotel the nickname The Monkey House.
Decades later, in 1977, when publican Graham Cox and his wife bought the hotel, its reputation was still very much intact.
“You could get into a taxi in Adelaide and say to the driver, ‘Take me to The Monkey House,’ and they’d bring you straight here,” Cox recalls.
He and his wife took up residence above the pub and began getting to know the regulars. Almost 50 years on, Cox says he’s friends with just about everyone who walks through the doors.
“Selling it’s going to be a bit hard,” he says. “You miss the regular clientele you speak to every day. We’ve had weddings here, we’ve had engagements. Everybody knows me.”
But agent Ryan Chester of Ray White Semaphore says Cox is slightly relieved, too.
“He’s been working there for 49 years, living and breathing it, but it’s just become a bit hard for him to manage, so he’s decided to retire and pass it on,” Chester says.
By the 1980s, Cox and his wife had grown tired of living upstairs and built a four-bedroom house on land behind the pub’s beer garden. That home is included in the freehold sale, which covers three titles.
Chester says the property would suit an enthusiastic owner-operator with an appetite for upgrading the hotel’s facilities. The main bar is dotted with memorabilia dating back to the 1970s and is starting to show its age, he says.
The new owner could choose to take advantage of the pub’s commercial kitchen, which is currently dormant, or expand its live-music program, which already draws up to 100 revellers to each gig, Cox says.
But dividing the asset into its constituent parts could prove challenging: the house straddles two of the three titles, as does the beer garden. Chester says he is exploring the possibility of boundary re-alignments on behalf of prospective buyers.
“We’re auctioning the property as a whole first,” Chester says. “Failing that, we will look into a realignment of the boundaries, but the plan is to take it to auction and get it sold on the day.”
Whoever takes over the pub can look forward to healthy patronage: a new wave of maritime workers will soon be building submarines nearby as part of the federal government’s AUKUS program.
“It bodes well for the new owner,” Chester says. “There’s going to be a real influx of people.”
