Lose yourself in a hidden Waikato fairytale retreat

Even on a rainy day the Falls Retreat has a magical ambience about it. A sort of ethereal calm.

It’s easy to see why Emma and Brad King fell in love with the idyllic Karangahake Gorge location.

“We stumbled across this place in 2010 when we were on holiday from Melbourne,” Brad said.

“We thought it was stunning and when we found out it was for sale we jumped at it.”

As a chef, Brad had always dreamed of owning his own restaurant. So the couple bought the property – then a tea-room – while they were still living in Melbourne and it sat dormant for a year before they could make the move across the ditch.

“Then when we took it over it had been turned into accommodation,” Emma said.

“Brad got a job at a local restaurant and we found out it wasn’t actually that easy to turn our new place into a restaurant. We needed a whole lot of new resource consent, a new septic tank, a bigger car park and all that kind of stuff so it turned into a bigger project than we thought.”

But, Brad said, once they’d gone past a certain point there was no way they were going to give up on the place. Three years later they finally opened the doors.

“We’ve been running nearly seven years now,” Brad said.

“A lot of people had their doubts because we are in the middle of nowhere. It’s a destination place – you have to know we are here.”

The couple believe the lengthy process was a blessing in disguise, as by the time they did open Brad had made a name for himself as an award-winning chef in the area while working at a local restaurant. 

“It was better than opening and people being like, ‘oh, who’s that dude on the hill?’ At least I had time to get to know the local people. But then it got to the point where we just had to make a run for it, we’d invested so much time and effort, there was no use turning back. We thought ‘let’s just go for it’,” Brad said.

And go for it they did. The humble retreat started with four staff; it now has 30.

Emma said a big part of the reason they had been successful, other than Brad’s outstanding cooking, was the location.

“We are an hour and half from Auckland, an hour from Hamilton and an hour from Tauranga so it’s a great place for people to go through. When people know we are here they actually plan to stop here on their way to other places,” she said.

And the couple’s growth shows no sign of wavering.

“It’s now bigger than we ever imagined. We’ve grown so much and we are looking to grow a bit more by hosting weddings, there’s a pagoda that overlooks two waterfalls where people can get married,” he said.

The impressive onsite gardens, next to the sprawling kids’ playground, provides the operation with all their greens and some other produce. And it’s just been opened for tours.

“We are now doing gardening workshops which is purely learning how to grown your own veggies and then we also do the ‘Gather' tour, aimed at foodies wanting to find out more about how we use our produce in the kitchen and bar,” Emma said.

“We go out in the garden and people can pick and taste things and then we tailor the menu so they get what they’ve picked for lunch.”

Brad said it was about taking an ethical stance on being organic and sustainable.

“If you want to create an amazing product on a plate, you have to start with amazing produce. That’s where the veggie gardens come in – it’s about providing a paddock to plate experience, not just a meal.”

For more on the Kings’ story and what they offer at the Falls Retreat check out their website http://www.fallsretreat.co.nz