About

Our story

When I first saw this place, it had been half-abandoned. The previous owners had mostly moved out, and you could still see dents in the carpet where their furniture had stood. The house felt tired. No one had been looking after it for a while.

But the bones had character. Walking down the track on my own that first day, I had a sudden sense that I belonged here. Nigel joined me two years later.

Almost everything since has been restoration rather than new building.

The Tree House is built mostly from kauri we rescued from an old villa. We took the villa apart piece by piece, drew a small sketch, and rebuilt it in the canopy with a zero-waste builder. Almost everything is recycled or repurposed. It has high ceilings and exposed beams, and beautiful handmade french doors. The kauri is back among trees.

The Hideaway is a kauri bushman's cottage built in 1910, beside a spring stream, with a secret garden.

The Tin Box is a shipping container given a second life in the bush, under a huge floating roof.

The Zephyr is a 1973 vintage caravan, now lined with birch ply and wool insulation, with cork floors and wooden windows. Nigel renovated its outdoor kitchen, down to the blackened timber wall.

Each place has a cast-iron bath outside, and the Tree House, Tin Box and Zephyr each have an outdoor kitchen.

Nigel spent years in advertising as a creative director. These days he restores buildings, and he's always working on his own project, The Lichen Protocol.

We're regenerating the land too, by rewilding it. We live here, on fourteen hectares of native bush near Trounson Kauri Park, and we look after the land the way we look after the buildings: slowly, repairing what's here before adding anything new.

Wild Forest Estate isn't a resort, a farmstay or a wellness retreat. It's a handful of rescued buildings in a regenerating kauri forest, and the two people restoring them.

Joanna & Nigel

Words from the Forest

In Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi is an orientation to the world: beauty found in imperfection, in transience, in the marks left by time.

Wild Forest Estate is a living expression of it.

The kingfisher perches on a book in the lounge. The goat finds the sun on the deck. Spiders float on threads across the forest on still mornings.

Guests arrive carrying whatever they've been carrying. A night or two in the forest and something shifts, they often can't quite name it. Joanna and Nigel have watched it happen often enough to trust it.

They don't claim credit. The forest was here first.