Three consecutive New Year's Days at the Greenwood Hotel in North Sydney — Patrick Topping in 2018, Carl Cox in 2019, and "Space NYD 2020 — A New Era" closing out the chapter just before the pandemic.
If Studio 338 became the European home of the post-closure Space brand, the Greenwood Hotel in North Sydney became its Southern-Hemisphere equivalent. The Greenwood is a heritage pub on Blue Street — right next to North Sydney station, with a vast open-air courtyard that operates as a daytime venue. In Australian summer that courtyard runs Ibiza-shaped: pool-and-terrace warmth, big international DJs, a crowd that knows the records.
Between 2018 and 2020, Space Ibiza On Tour ran a New Year's Day residency there. Three consecutive years, same date slot, same venue, escalating line-ups. It is one of the cleanest examples of how the touring brand built recurring traditions in the cities where the local audience showed up.
The first New Year's Day at the Greenwood was the test. Promoted by Paul Strange Presents together with Space Ibiza Festival, the inaugural NYD18 line-up was tight and well-chosen for the daytime-terrace format:
The reception was strong enough that the 2019 edition was already in planning before the dust settled.
The 2019 edition is the historically important one. Carl Cox headlined, joined by Eric Powell and Javi Bora — the same Carl Cox who had played the marathon nine-hour closing set at the original Space on 2 October 2016, now back at a Space-branded New Year's Day in a Southern-Hemisphere courtyard. The visual symmetry of that booking did most of the storytelling on its own.
Carl Cox spoke about the Greenwood booking in subsequent interviews. The shorthand was that the open-air daytime format, the Sydney summer light, and the audience response combined into the closest he had felt to playing Space Ibiza since the closure. For the Space team, that was the highest-possible third-party endorsement.
Space Ibiza at the Greenwood was next level. — Carl Cox, Sydney 2019
The third edition was branded "Space NYD 2020 — A New Era" — an explicit signal that the post-Ibiza touring chapter was settling into a recurring tradition. The Greenwood was sold out, the format was locked in, and by every public indication a fourth edition was on its way.
Then COVID arrived in March 2020. Australia closed its international borders soon after. NYD 2021 could not happen. The residency paused without a formal goodbye.
Three things about the Greenwood made the residency work:
Most Australian clubs are indoor rooms with sound restrictions and curfews. The Greenwood's open-air heritage courtyard sidesteps that: it is a daytime venue with a music licence that runs into the evening, with the sky as a ceiling and warm summer air doing what the Playa d'en Bossa runway air used to do for the original Space terrace.
1 January in Sydney is summer. The NYE-recovery crowd that arrives at 12pm wants a daylight party, not another midnight room. The slot mirrors exactly what the original Space did on Sundays in Ibiza summer — you start in daytime, you run all afternoon, you finish in the evening. The booking calendar was deliberate.
Javi Bora played all three editions. The Space team treated the Greenwood as a real residency, not a one-off booking, and brought their own resident in each year to anchor the room. That continuity is what separated the Greenwood from being a generic licensing deal.
| Date | Event | Headliners |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Jan 2018 | Space Ibiza On Tour NYD18 | Patrick Topping, Pleasurekraft, Adana Twins, Jasper James, Javi Bora |
| 1 Jan 2019 | Space Ibiza NYD 2019 | Carl Cox, Eric Powell, Javi Bora |
| 1 Jan 2020 | Space NYD 2020 — A New Era | Multi-DJ programme; sold out |
| 2021 | (Cancelled — COVID border closures) | — |
The Greenwood residency was the touring brand's most successful proof-of-concept outside Europe. It established that the Space format could survive a 24-hour flight and a hemisphere change. It re-anchored Carl Cox to a Space-branded room less than three years after the closing fiesta. And it built a date in the Sydney clubbing calendar that is still remembered as one of the better NYD parties of the late 2010s.
Of the three big post-2016 international touring residencies — London, Sydney and (in 2024) Riccione — Sydney was the one most cleanly cut short by external events, not by demand. There is a parallel-universe version of this page in which the residency is now running its ninth NYD in 2026.
The Greenwood Hotel in North Sydney (36 Blue Street, NSW 2060). The Space Ibiza On Tour New Year's Day residency ran at the Greenwood from 1 January 2018 through to Space NYD 2020 on 1 January 2020.
Yes. Carl Cox headlined Space Ibiza NYD 2019 at the Greenwood Hotel on 1 January 2019, supported by Eric Powell and Javi Bora. He later said playing the Greenwood was the closest he had felt to playing Space Ibiza since the 2016 closure.
The Greenwood Hotel in North Sydney has a heritage open-air courtyard that operates as a daytime venue, which is the closest format match in the Southern Hemisphere to the original Space Ibiza terrace. The Australian summer New Year's Day slot mirrors the Ibiza closing-fiesta atmosphere.
COVID. The 1 January 2020 edition sold out and the working assumption was that NYD 2021 would happen as the fourth consecutive year. Australia closed its international borders in March 2020 and the residency was paused indefinitely. There is no public confirmation it has restarted.
The 2018 edition was a joint Paul Strange Presents / Space Ibiza Festival production. Subsequent editions retained Space Ibiza branding with local Sydney promoter involvement.
Sources include the Space Ibiza official news archive, Resident Advisor event listings (RA event IDs 1050162, 1340848 and earlier), Carl Cox post-event interviews carried by Mixmag, and Sydney club press coverage of the 2018-2020 NYD events. This page is editorial and is not affiliated with the official Space Ibiza brand or the Greenwood Hotel.