How did we land in Tasmania to live? Well it's a long story but a beautiful one. We lived on the Northern Beaches of Sydney for many years with our blended family of four children and owned many successful businesses there, one including a fab Pie Shop in Brookvale "The Brooky Pie" winning us best pies in Sydney as well as consecutive local small business awards. 

I am a photographer and had a lovely studio in our home on the beaches and was honoured to photograph hundreds of newborn babies and families, also winning many awards including silver in the Australian Institute of Professional Photography Awards. David was a highly successful structural landscape designer and tradesman creating some of the northern beaches most impressive landscape projects.

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We decided to leave the beaches and move to the Blue Mountains to Wentworth Falls, just two hours out of Sydney, so we sold the pie shop and off we went knowing that we wanted to build a little cabin at the back of our property to list on "airbnb". Here is where our artistic endeavours started again and David began a journey of painting and creating and I changed my portrait photography to fine art work. David being the structural landscaper /builder put his amazing skills to work and together we built the cabin as owner builders and poured our love and hard work into the little cabin we aptly called Falls Rest. Fast forward to 2023, I won Airbnb's Top performing Female Host in the whole of Australia for the most 5 star reviews.

We love that our little cabin that we built from the ground up won such an amazing award with so many other fantastic hosts and airbnbs. You can hear a podcast about our Blue Mountains journey here! We then went on to build a gorgeous Glasshouse juxtaposed to Falls Rest that we wanted to hold stunning proposals and elopements in and we did hold a few amazing celebrations in the glasshouse but our hearts were being pulled in another direction after the passing of my beautiful mum.

And so the search for a property in Tasmania began. We can proudly say that at the end of hosting Falls Rest and selling our home and business David and I ended up with 343 consecutive "5 STAR reviews" and our cabin was in the top 1% of airbnbs worldwide, a huge achievement we think!

 

Next stop, we searched high and low on real estate sites, from one end of Tassie to the other, finding so many beautiful spots, we had to narrow down our search. It was time to fly over to see if it really was our next big move and the minute we landed we knew it was right. The freshest air in the world, mountains and beaches, arts and crafts and boutique food and wine, Tasmania has it all, it's wild and free and still so so quiet and the rest they say is history. We sold our home in the mountains and the new custodians are still running Falls Rest and the Glasshouse at Falls Rest, and we have embarked on a new adventure with so much to love and learn about our beautiful new state, one thing is for sure we are so glad to now call Tassie home!

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​As we learn to live on the land and watch our amazing valley change with the seasons, it's this that now brings us new inspiration daily to create wonderful art for our gallery space. Renovating our home to become a fab BnB so you can stay, play and create with us, so many new wonderful ideas we hope to bring to life here, Hideaway in the Huon is on its way!

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Love Nicole & David

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