Bush Summit 2024: Warren Brown’s road trip hits Charters Towers

It’s not a conundrum terribly many people would have to deal with: “I’ve just bought a disused psychiatric hospital, now what am I going to do with it?” TAKE A TOUR

It’s not a conundrum terribly many people would have to deal with: “I’ve just bought a disused psychiatric hospital, now what am I going to do with it?”

This is something two entrepreneurial Brits Les Bone and Vanessa Stanley-Johns must surely have discussed back in 2016 after buying the old Charters Towers psychiatric hospital 140km southwest of Townsville: a sprawling 80ha, 1950s-designed complex that once housed 300 to 600 patients.

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It operated as Mossman Hall Psychiatric Hospital from 1954 until it was closed in 2001 due to a change in thinking in the treatment of patients where many were rehabilitated back in to society.

The size of the hospital is staggering, with its grand front office block, it’s bitumen roads, it barrack-style buildings in slow decay denoting what a monumental undertaking it was for two people to take on a project the size of a suburb.

Les Bone and partner Vanessa Stanley-Johns in an unrenovated section of the psychiatric hospital. Picture: Toby Zerna

My first question to Les, a former professional squash player and now enthusiastic asylum owner is: “Why did you buy a psychiatric hospital?”

“Well, we thought it was such a beautiful property, and being a Pom and used to old properties we thought it was a great opportunity to create something new and repurpose the old hospital,” he said.

Curiously Les and Vanessa both have a remarkable vision for the estate, now called Kernow – the Cornish word for Cornwall, from where Les originates – piece by piece converting the languishing old hospital into a first class resort with at present, fifteen fully furnished luxury apartments.

These apartments – in what are converted hospital dormitories – are indeed stunning, exquisitely designed and furnished by Vanessa, whose flair for interior design has created an individual theme in each unit,

“We wanted to do something different for the town” Vanessa tells me.

“We tried to do it as we wanted it to be when we were travelling – somewhere that was homely and smart – but not a cold hotel room…”

A bathroom in one of the renovated rooms. Picture: Toby Zerna

Indeed, the old hospital is now a popular venue for corporate business functions with a fully operational conference centre and swimming pool – and shortly work will commence on a further 13 suites and construction on a three-megalitre lagoon.

Nevertheless, despite the exquisite work the pair have achieved in creating the apartments, Les takes me on a tour of parts of the hospital they haven’t touched yet, venturing down a dark corridor in what was once called The Dalrymple Wing – a derelict concrete building where patients were once housed in tiny, bare rooms the size of solitary confinement cells.

“A typical room for one of the ‘cusp’ clients I think we call them ’ Les tells me, inferring to one the more unpredictable inmates who once inhabited the hospitable.

After all these years so much of the hospital’s original infrastructure is still sitting there intact – the clinical, communal bathrooms, laundries, kitchens – all a stark reminder of what this place once was and it’s not long before you’re envisaging Jack Nicholson receiving medication from Nurse Ratched.

But I have to ask Les the obvious question, do you call it a psychiatric hospital or an asylum?

He smiles, “Well I like to call it an asylum because I think it’s more amusing for people to say, I‘ve stayed overnight in my first asylum.”

The bedroom in one of the renovated rooms. Picture: Toby Zerna