Mark Foy is a name that many Sydneysiders ought to recognise. One of the city’s most prestigious department stores, “The Piazza”, was opened by the Foy brothers in 1909 on Liverpool Street and was modelled on Paris’s famous Bon Marché. With its marble lobbies and 1920s remodelled art deco façade it was a Sydney institution until it closed in 1980 (it’s now the Downing Centre courthouses) but it still catches the eye of anyone passing by the southern end of Hyde Park. What is less well known is that in 1904 Mark Foy, a convert to the European fad for hydrotherapy, bought up a kilometre of land overlooking the Megalong Valley in the Blue Mountains in order to build New South Wales’ first health spa.

A true eccentric, Foy had the impressive ‘casino’ with its enormous dome built and shipped over from the US. Meanwhile, he imported his ‘healthful’ waters from Baden-Baden (they apparently tasted so unpleasant that patrons automatically believed they must be doing them some good). But as the craze for hydrotherapy waned, so too did Foy’s income, leading him to reinvent the Hydro Majestic as a swanky hotel where the hip and happening could travel the four-hour...