This luxurious lakeside retreat is the perfect place to reflect and reset

Tasmania’s lauded Pumphouse Point might be known for its iconic floating rooms, but nestled amidst the trees just metres from the shore lies what is surely one of the ‘Apple Isle’’s most luxurious lodgings

Silence – the sort that is pervasive and total – is good for us. It’s good for our relationships; it’s good for our wellbeing. It can connect us to nature, and renew our sense of place in the world. It’s also increasingly hard to find. Our planet started getting noisy with the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s; avoiding it has been an increasingly lost cause ever since.

On the southern shoreline of Lake St Clair, Australia’s deepest freshwater lake high in Tasmania’s Central Highlands amidst forests of ancient myrtle, sits Pumphouse Point, a hydro-electric pumping station built in 1939 to provide the nearby Tarraleah Power Station with water. Ironically itself a legacy of ill-conceived industrialisation, it was barely ever used. A relic, a folly it turned out, the government finally placed the pumphouse and its shore-based substation on the open market in 1995. Then along came Simon Currant. A developer and entrepreneur, Simon, together with a group of like-minded investors, secured a 50-year lease on the property, and together began to build their vision of a unique, low-impact wilderness retreat.

10,000 years ago the Derwent Glacier filled this valley. It regularly and noisily would have calved off huge chunks of ice on its slow journey to oblivion. These days, the silence is such you don’t even get to hear that. It’s a playful thought. Could this place possibly be quieter than it was 10,000 years ago?

On 1 January 2015 Pumphouse Point was given fresh life as one of Australia’s most audacious boutique hotels. There are now 18 rooms spread over the sites’ two heritage buildings – over three levels in the pumphouse on the water, and in the old substation, which is still full of Hydro-era and other Art Deco features including a magnificent stairwell and some lovely thirties-era glass bricks by the entrance door.

The retreat

After ten years spent looking at pictures of the pumphouse on the lake and vowing I’d stay out there one day, when I finally made it there my hosts had other ideas, putting me instead in a latecomer to the site, a room they called “The Retreat”. “What’s that?” I asked. “It’s over there,” someone said. I looked, but could only see trees. Whatever it was, it didn’t want to be seen, and even worse, it seemed to me – it wasn’t on the lake.

My gloom lifted like a fog under a morning sun the moment I saw it. A sanctuary within a sanctuary just metres from the shore, The Retreat has to be one of Tasmania’s most coveted spaces. Designed by the Hobart-based architectural firm Jaws Architects and assembled offsite, it was brought here on the back of a semi-trailer to minimise site disturbance. From the moment it arrived, it instantly belonged.

A pre-fabricated triumph of contemporary design, its exterior of rough sawn Silvertop Ash has already greyed to perfection. Inside, a fully glazed northern wall frames the lake and gives you your own private view of the pumphouse. Its ceiling is Tasmanian Oak, and there’s additional joinery on the walls. More than half of the interior is wood.

There’s Tasmanian artisan furniture, board games, a well stocked fireplace, an external deck with your own bath tub, and another indoor bespoke tub. The King bed is sumptuous, and your complimentary larder is filled with Tasmanian craft beers, wines, dried olives, quince, cheeses, pastrami and smoked ham. In a word: breathtaking.

The Retreat is a 30 metre walk to the Shorehouse dining room. Added in 2017, breakfast and dinner is served here and guests are encouraged to sit at communal tables and are spoiled with seasonal three-course set menus that are as hearty as they are fancy: pea and mint soup with wasabi mayo, wood-fired short ribs, ocean trout in white wine sauce, saffron poached pears. If you’re fortunate to be there on a Saturday night you can gather round the outdoor fire pit for a barbeque while sipping on mulled wines.

Every room at Pumphouse Point comes with breakfast, a larder lunch – with warm and outrageously crispy sourdough bread! – and dinner included. Massages are also available, and there are complimentary e-bikes and an honesty bar. Wallabies, echidnas, pademelons and quolls are about. You might even see a platypus.

Here, you truly want for nothing.

The wilderness

You’re also within the boundaries of Cradle Mountain – Lake St Clair National Park, which means local trails, from short to tenacious, abound. One of the more rewarding is the Shadow Lake Circuit trail. Allow 4-5 hours for the 13-kilometre return journey along a trail that can be difficult when muddy. I found the initial 330-metre ascent a bit of a slog even though the trail was dry, but the rewards are spectacular as you weave through forests of pandini, myrtle and deciduous beech into a subalpine region full of buttongrass, flourishing sedges and pencil pines. Be sure to take warm waterproof clothing and good walking boots, too, as conditions here can change with little warning.

Other shorter, family-oriented trails beckon too, and all begin at the Visitor Centre at Cynthia Bay, a few kilometres down the road beyond the Pumphouse Point gates. Walk to Platypus Bay, or see Tasmanian waratahs and towering eucalypt stags on the Watersmeet trail.

Pumphouse Point embodies that old real estate cliché of “location, location, location”. Its presence is by no means an improvement on nature, but is, without doubt, an improvement on man’s facile attempts to control it.

Hotel Notes

Rates for a shorehouse standard room begin at $615 per room per night. Rates for the pumphouse start at $840 per room per night. Rates for The Retreat start from $1980 per night. Discounts are available for NRMA members.

Pumphouse Point
pumphousepoint.com.au