Four years after it was razed in a bushfire, Australia’s Southern Ocean Lodge is reborn
The celebrated wilderness lodge on Kangaroo Island has risen from the ashes and welcomed its first guests last week
I’m trying to guess where John Hird was when Southern Ocean Lodge, the multi-award-winning resort he manages on Kangaroo Island, burnt to the ground during Australia’s Black Summer wildfires of 2020. In Kingscote, the island’s main town? Across the strait on the mainland?
“In the bunker.” The bunker? “Yep. Right there, under the Great Room,” he says, indicating the lodge’s sleek oval lounge-bar-restaurant area below the sand dune we’re standing on — clad in limestone and floor-to-ceiling glass, with views over the Southern Ocean that have been captured in countless glossy magazine pages over the years.
Built into the concrete plinth below it is a space envisioned for precisely the sort of disastrous scenario that began unfolding here on December 20 2019, when a lightning strike on the island’s north coast ignited the surrounding bush. Days later, a second fire started in Flinders Chase National Park, not far from the lodge on the south-west coast. The lodge’s guests were swiftly evacuated.
The two blazes raged for weeks; by the time they were contained in early February 2020, they had destroyed more than 210,000 hectares, much of it protected wilderness. Crops, homes and businesses burned, and some 32,000 head of livestock perished, along with significant numbers of the native koala population and the unique kangaroo species for which the island, Australia’s third largest, is named. Southern Ocean Lodge and all 112 hectares of its protected wilderness were, bar a few steel beams, entirely consumed.
While Hird was in his bunker, James Baillie, who with his wife Hayley founded the company that owns and manages the lodge, was chartering a plane to Kingscote; he arrived at the lodge to find a smouldering ruin. The long timber boardwalk that meandered through native melaleuca to the shore was, like everything else, gone, bits of timber still smoking. But at its far end Baillie spotted the Gervasoni ceramic table-for-two he’d had shipped from Italy and positioned on a prime outlook at the ocean’s edge, where over the years it had become a sort of emblem of the close-to-nature elegance the lodge espoused.
Looking at it, he recalls, he felt his heart lift a little; something, at least, had survived. A few seconds later, it exploded before his eyes.
Last week, Hird and the Baillies were on hand to welcome a small group of guests who’d come from near and far to inaugurate the newly rebuilt lodge — “SOL 2.0”, as everyone on site refers to it, four years and a reported A$50mn (£26mn) in the making. It reopens with an abundance of goodwill behind its sails and, according to James, some A$2mn worth of fire-prevention infrastructure above and beyond what South Australia’s already stringent standards require.
The event felt surprisingly emotional — apposite, perhaps, for a property that lives in the minds of many Australians and international travellers as much more than a conventional hotel. Southern Ocean Lodge topped international “best of” lists when it opened in 2008 and still sits in the pantheon of remote wilderness properties worldwide that have pioneered meaningful sustainability and conservation initiatives while offering food, wine, service and creature comforts on a par with anything in the country’s urban capitals. And it is an avatar of Australianism, at once low-key and world-class, the object of national pride and affection.
The Baillies, whose hotel-lodge collection also includes Longitude 131 at Uluru and Capella Lodge on Lord Howe Island, sold the company to American private equity group KSL Capital Partners in April 2019, though they stayed on as consulting creative directors.
In February 2020, once the shock of the fire had abated, former and current owners were in agreement on a course of action: rebuild, but don’t mess too much with a good thing. “That said, there was both a product and an architectural opportunity to re-craft certain elements,” says James Baillie.
They brought back Max Pritchard, the Kangaroo Island-born, Adelaide-based architect with whom they’d worked on the original design. Sustainability, and safety, were paramount: solar panels, already long in use, power the off-grid site and charge ancillary batteries, with a diesel generator operating for a maximum of eight hours at night. Every roof on the premises now collects rainwater; reverse-osmosis technology purifies the drinking water, and some five million litres — three million more than before — are now available for the anti-fire sprinkler system.
Besides the relocation and expansion of the spa, and the construction of an private four-bedroom “residence”, a reorientation of the suites to a more eastern-facing outlook is the only easily visible architectural alteration to the original structure. “The big change is, of course, what the lodge is constructed from,” says James. Timber, paints and many textiles are not only largely low VOC (volatile organic compounds) but also as often as possible fire-retardant. The island sandstone, already deployed liberally in the original — it has a luminous, beautifully creamy tone — encloses bathrooms and lines floors in the Great Room. (“That room was so successful that we wanted to reproduce it as closely as possible,” says Pritchard. “So many guests had commented on the overwhelming experience of [that] great vista of the Southern Ocean being dramatically revealed.”)
Surrounding the entire lodge in a several-metre-wide ribbon is a band of boobialla — native juniper — which is relatively fire-retardant. Some of the cuttings are still in their protective collars, others are already filling out into a soft grey-green lace.
“It’s the only thing that gets to me a bit,” James says of the new landscaping, showing me a photo taken in 2019, when dense bush reached all the way to the weathered edge of each deck, an unbroken vivid green swath fronting the mercurial Southern Ocean. When they first comprehended the scale of the destruction, “Hayley was much more, ‘Let’s get on with it’ in that Australian way — resilient, practical — whereas I was just, whoa,” he says. “It was quite confronting, the devastation. To me, the lodge burning down was one thing, but the scorched wilderness was . . . ” he trails off, shrugging.
“We were trying to maintain some kind of positive mindset, for the staff but also the KSL guys who’d just bought this asset,” Hayley adds. “They’d never seen anything so apocalyptic. So that rally cry — ‘Hey, we’ve got this, we’ll bring it back’ — we had to sell that vision from the start.”
The Baillies first saw the site more than 20 years ago. There was no road in; they bushwhacked to a stretch of the south-west coast they’d been told about by locals, overlooking a crescent of white sand on Hanson Bay, and knew they’d found the place. The lodge’s undulating silhouette, integrated low in the slope, reflects the intention of architect Pritchard to “limit disturbance of land and vegetation, both by design and construction techniques”. In the 2.0 version, the suites face south-east rather than due south — water and shoreline views now, rather than pure ocean horizon — but still nestle cleverly one into the other along a subtly bending corridor that descends towards the beach. Each has a sunken living area with a fireplace built into the limestone wall.
Across an open-air causeway is the new spa (the former location is marked by a stone bathtub that survived the blaze, now hidden in overgrowth). Limestone blocks, eucalyptus timber and tall picture windows — including in the sauna, next to the hot and cold plunge pools — frame abstracts of bushland, cloud and sky.
Besides being a locus of extraordinary landscapes, flora and fauna — from the grey kangaroos to the long-nose fur seals cavorting under the spectacular stalactites of Admirals Arch, as well as dozens of bird species and more than 180 of gum tree — Kangaroo Island, like the rest of South Australia, is known for the quality of its food produce. This is deployed with exceptional skill and imagination by Tom Saliba, a Maltese-Australian chef who’s worked with the Baillies for years. Saliba has nine nationalities in the lodge’s kitchen, and flavours from south-east Asia, southern Europe and Latin America intersect at almost every meal.
The food is fantastic (as it needs to be, in a country with such a high per capita instance of world-beating restaurants). The unflappable British-born Hird, an aficionado of South Australian wines, maintains a “living” cellar (no set list; stock comes in, it goes out, something new and exciting replaces it), showcased in a slick new private dining room. A bottle or two of Henschke’s Hill of Grace single-vineyard Shiraz can probably be found for the legend-seekers, but Hird might equally recommend a young Nero d’Avola from the Barossa Valley.
But, ultimately, why you come is the island itself. There’s a reason all those glass walls have been incorporated into the design; Kangaroo Island is still sparsely populated — about 4,300 permanent residents, on 1,700 square miles — and has a quintessentially Australian beauty, made more severe round its edges both by the scars of the fires and its proximity to the yawning ocean. (“Next stop, Antarctica” is a common refrain around here.) Blackened fingers of gums reach skyward from viridescent bush and creepers. Ospreys and wedge-tailed eagles rise on high thermals above; southern right whales sometimes pass offshore.
A nice place to admire it all: the newly installed table-for-two — a near-exact replica of the one lost in the fire — set at the far end of an equally new timber boardwalk, where bush meets sand and sky.
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Maria Shollenbarger was a guest of Southern Ocean Lodge (southernoceanlodge.com.au, suites for two people from A$3,400/£1,787 per night, full-board) and of Tourism Australia (australia.com)
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