Newcastle · Lake Macquarie

A stay you build yourself.

Take the house for a few nights, then choose what happens in it. Everything is run by someone local.

Build your stay

The idea

A retreat you don't have to fly to.

Most retreats hand you a fixed schedule and a room with strangers in it. This is a house that sleeps your own people, and a stay you shape yourself.

Pick as much or as little as you want. Some groups fill every slot. Some take the house, book a chef for one night, and leave the rest empty. Both are fine.

Build your stay

Start with the house.

Nothing is locked in here — this comes to us as an enquiry. We check the house and each of the locals involved, then come back to you with a per-person rate.

The house
One group at a time. Nobody else checks in while you're there.
How many guests
Minimum four.
When could you come?
Tap every date that could work — the more you pick, the better our chance of lining everyone up. It doesn't have to be a weekend.
MTWTFSS
First evening
You arrive from 4pm
Next morning
 
Afternoon
Lunch onwards
That evening
At the long table

The houses

The lounge deck and fire bowl beside the pool at dusk

Tighes Hill

The Gables

The living end opens straight through to the pool, so the doors stay open and the inside and outside stop being separate rooms. Past the water there's a timber deck with a fire bowl and four chairs — the flat, quiet corner of the house. That's where the mats go in the morning and where everyone ends up after dinner.

Ten minutes from the city, walking distance to the cooking school.

The lounge room at Blackalls Park, fire lit under a vaulted ceiling

Lake Macquarie

Blackalls Park

Acreage on the lake, with a produce garden and room for a bigger group. Quieter than the city house, and slower — the mornings here happen in the lounge room, under a vaulted ceiling with the fire going and the light coming in off the lawn.

The long table seats twelve. Half an hour from Newcastle, and a long way from anything hurried.

Who runs it

Every part of the stay is somebody local.

Lizz Pennings

Yoga & energy healing

Lizz Pennings

Lizz is a Newcastle yoga teacher with 600 hours of training, a Reiki master and a sound healer, and she has run retreats internationally. Her practice draws on time spent in Bali and India.

Sessions are shaped around whoever is in the house — on the deck at Tighes Hill, in the lounge room at Blackalls Park.

The Yellow Door Kitchen Cooking School

Cooking classes

The Yellow Door Kitchen

A cooking school a few minutes up the road in Tighes Hill, behind a yellow door and a striped awning. You cook it, then you sit down and eat it — which makes it dinner as much as a class.

A chef plating dinner

Private chef

Dallas Hayes

Dallas cooked on private yachts and in high-end kitchens across Europe before coming home to Newcastle. He works from three set menus, cooks in the kitchen you've been using all weekend, and serves at the long table — no booking, no taxis, nobody watching the clock.

Tell us what you eat and what you don't, and the menu is built around it. Subject to availability.

The Newy Tour Co van

Tours

Newy Tour Co

Picked up from the door and shown the region by someone who lives in it. Five tours to choose from:

  • Newcastle Coastal Charms & City Secrets Three hours — beaches, Fort Scratchley, Christ Church Cathedral, the Bogey Hole and the ANZAC Memorial Walk.
  • Newcastle Food & Street Art Tour Three hours on foot through Newcastle East, with tastings, murals and the stories behind them.
  • Hunter Valley Wine Tour Full day, picked up from the house. Three cellar-door tastings plus spirits and local produce.
  • Port Stephens Whale Watching Full day on the coast during the humpback migration season.
  • Private and customised tours Newcastle, the Hunter or Port Stephens, put together around your group.
Dan Frodsham of Newcastle Surf School on the beach with a lesson

Mornings · Tighes Hill

Newcastle Surf School

Run by Dan Frodsham, who started in nippers at eight and spent six years on the world tour — Bali, Tahiti, France, Brazil, South Africa — before taking on the licence to run a surf school here in 2000.

Boards and wetsuits provided, on the beaches Newcastle is actually known for. Good for the half of the group who didn't come for the yoga.

A golfer on the course at Newcastle Golf Club, late afternoon

Afternoons

Golf

From The Gables — Newcastle Golf Club. A championship course at the mouth of the Hunter River, laid out over sand dunes in the manner of the old links courses, but cut through eucalypts and angophoras rather than gorse. Kookaburras, bearded dragons and the occasional wallaby. Wide bands of trees between the fairways make it feel a long way from the port a few kilometres up the road. Nine holes with a cart, teeing off at 3pm.

From Blackalls Park — Toronto Golf Club. The closest course to the homestead, on the western side of Lake Macquarie.

We book whichever fits your house, and we can arrange transport to the course and back if nobody wants to drive.