FREMANTLE council’s planning committee says it can’t support mining billionaire Andrew Forrest’s six-storey hotel on the Spicer site.

Mr Forrest’s company Fiveight has proposed a 117-room hotel on the site with a rooftop pool and plans to make a public laneway that will take people from the Fremantle Markets through Paddy Troy mall and into the High Street Mall.

But it’s faced concerted opposition from the Fremantle Society because it will dominate the two-storey Warders Cottages across Henderson Street – the only WA residential homes on the national heritage list.

The council’s planners recommended the hotel be approved, but the resistance was spearheaded by councillor Su Groome, who put up an amendment recommending the state-controlled JDAP (which gets the ultimate say on whether the hotel gets approved) defers the application until Fiveight reduces the heights along Henderson Street to the 14 metres allowed under the planning scheme.

She also noted the hotel’s proposed facade, which takes its cue from the Queensgate carpark “is an inappropriate response to the fine grain and scale of the existing, significant, heritage streetscape”.