“It was just one of those occasions when neither of us were necessarily looking for our forever person, but the spark was there immediately and we knew it was something that was definitely worth exploring, so we stuck at it,” explains Suine. “For 10 months we just commuted back and forward every weekend between Sydney and Canberra until we realised that it wasn’t that enjoyable, so 10 months after moving to Canberra, I came to Sydney and we moved in together,” adds Stead.

That was the beginning of a shared life that has seen both men forge successful corporate careers in Sydney, get married, complete an inner-city renovation and adopt their son, Abraham. What came next was less traditional: the couple made a complete sea change, bought 96 acres on Tasmania’s King Island, in the middle of Bass Strait, and opened the award-winning Kittawa Lodge.

“It’s really funny because we have a lot of corporate types come and stay with us and they often say, how did you do this? How did you come here? It is almost like you have arrived on some alien planet, it is so different,” says Stead. “But it is just a real mindset shift. We used to have that corporate life in Sydney and come here to escape, and now this is our home and we go to Sydney to have a break.

“But I don’t think it was a severe change for us, for a few reasons. While we were living in Sydney, we weren’t going out every night like we did when we were younger. We had an amazing time in our twenties in Paddington, going out every weekend with friends and living the life. But once we got older, and particularly after we had our son, we actually craved space and the quiet.”

The pair bought the land at King Island – with no power, no roads, no sewerage, nothing at all – in 2015. The purchase came off the back of Stead and Suine spending years travelling to luxury lodges around the world. “Travel was always our passion, and the backpack was put away and we started going to these places globally and in Australia,” explains Suine. “The more we stayed at luxury lodges the more we fell in love with the concept, and we saw roughly the same type of people staying at these places each time. We always chatted openly about what we liked and didn’t like about each offering, and what we wished would be improved in our experience.”

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Meet the couple who left city life to start a remote island retreat

Nick Stead and Aaron Suine turned their back on corporate careers in Sydney to pursue the ultimate sea change: building a luxury lodge in the middle of Bass Strait.

They began talking about opening a luxury lodge of their own and soon started hunting for potential properties with a few really specific qualities. It had be remote but accessible from the major cities, have a good local farming community that could provide the produce to enable a farm-to-table philosophy with the food, and artists to showcase local art and handmade wares.

“We had a vision of what we wanted to create and the property had to allow for that,” says Suine. “What was really core to our dream was to create these very private, very secluded lodges where no guest could see any other guest. So we were looking for a property with undulations that would allow us to naturally bed these lodges into little valleys and nooks.

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“The land on King Island has 12,000-year-old sand dunes so you really feel like you are the only person on the property, and that is key. As soon as we saw it we knew it was time to bite the bullet and purchase it, but it was a purchase that was 10 years in the making.”

Both Stead and Suine’s parents were quite perplexed by the couple’s sudden change in direction, and even after they visited King Island it took them a while to come around to the idea as they could not understand why the pair would throw away their successful careers (Suine was a partner in a law firm and Stead an organisational psychologist looking after leadership at an investment bank).

“We just took the view that we weren’t passionate about our careers anymore,” says Suine. “The fire in our belly that was there at the start – when you were really cutting your teeth and learning every day – had been extinguished. We weren’t challenged and we felt like there was a gaping hole in that part of our life.

“We also felt really strongly about doing something together as a couple and creating something from the ground up.”

In hindsight, finding and buying the property was the easy part. The couple spent the next five years repeatedly trying to get the accommodation – there are two one-bedroom lodges – built. They hired architects and engaged builders, only to have three failed attempts at construction, with builders doubling their price at the last minute or cancelling the contracts. Stead and Suine were at the point of desperation when they decided to hit pause on the whole thing – they were doing it remotely from Sydney while still working full-time – and instead concentrate on applying to adopt a child.

“The same day we got approved for adoption they essentially offered Abraham to us, which is pretty much unheard of because you normally have to wait a couple of years,” explains Stead. “He was 16 months old, born in Sydney, and was living with a foster family. So everything came to a grinding halt on King Island. I immediately took 10 months off work and it was life-changing.”

But when Stead went back to work, the reasons the couple wanted to relocate to King Island came into focus again, but with more clarity. He says Abraham was in daycare five days a week, with Suine leaving for work at 5am so he could pick his son up at 5pm and Stead staying late at his job. “We tried to have family time on the weekends but you are just exhausted,” he recalls. So they went back to the drawing board, sold their house in Paddington, and got two entirely off-the-grid lodges built on their King Island property, now called Kittawa Lodge. They opened in October 2019 and come January 2020 were “starting to get an occupancy rate they had never dreamed of”. And then Covid hit.

“It was a really, really difficult time for Nick and I because we were used to having a not insignificant amount of money in our savings – a nest egg – and we didn’t have any at all,” says Stead. “It was probably the worst time in modern history to open a tourism business, but it was also the best time to get our son out of the city. Being on King Island, we didn’t have any cases of Covid until 2022 and Abraham didn’t miss a single day of school, and we didn’t really have to wear masks.”

Fast forward to the resumption of domestic and international travel and Kittawa Lodge has been a hit among Australians for its ability to allow a complete disconnect from their lives, and internationally it is getting visitors from Europe and North America. Just a 35-minute flight from Melbourne Airport, the accommodation has already taken out a slew of awards from Condé Nast Traveller’s Readers Choice Awards as one of the best resorts in the region, best new tourism business in Tasmania, best new luxury hotel in Australia, and even for one of the best bathtubs in the country (“everyone loves our bathrooms” according to Stead – there are floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the coastline).

As for how a former lawyer and a former psychologist divvy up running a luxury lodge, Suine is in charge of the creative side, from the design of the lodges to the food and the experience, and Stead takes care of the front-line part of the business. He greets guests and checks them in and out. “I’m more of the big dreamer, the strategy person, the creative driver of all things Kittawa and Nick does an incredible job on the operations front,” says Suine. “I am also looking at what Kittawa will look like in two or five years. We are thinking of doing a centralised restaurant and a day spa so the dining options we have are not just confined to the lodges.”

For Suine, who spent so many decades in the very straight-laced corporate world, Kittawa Lodge has finally given him the freedom to express his creativity. He grew up in country NSW in the 1990s and was often the only boy in dance classes, and that was discouraged by his family because they were “concerned what it may mean” and they wanted to protect him from being teased.

“Kittawa Lodge has enabled me to just have this unending level of passion, explore my creative side openly, and because I have withheld that for so long in my life it just means more,” he explains. “So many of our guests speak about how they can see the attention to detail in the lodges and the amount of thought and passion that has gone into the space, and I think that is because for the first time in our lives it is a true creative outlet for us.”

Both men say that being gay has shaped who they are as individuals and that they have suffered discrimination as a result. “I remember on our 10th anniversary we were walking hand in hand down Oxford Street when these people drove past in their car and shouted ‘faggots’ at us,” Stead recalls. “So when you talk about it defining you, those are the moments that really hurt. Even though you have been together for 10 years, that really still makes you question your worth and question society and why someone would feel the need to hurt you.”

But the pair believe it has got much better, and any reservations they had about relocating from Paddington to a remote Tasmanian island and being the first gay couple there to have a child (Abraham is now eight) were totally unfounded. “We have been really fortunate to see that society has progressed enough to a point where we haven’t faced any type of open discrimination like that here,” Stead says. “I just hope society continues to evolve so our son doesn’t face any discrimination about being the son of a gay couple, whatever path he may choose in the future.”

Stead and Suine will this year celebrate 18 years together and are very aware of the upside of meeting so young (apart from avoiding online dating apps). “I feel really privileged that we could combine our lives and really stretch ourselves at a very early age that essentially allowed us to build wealth and build Kittawa,” Stead says. “Everything we have now is because of what we have done together,” adds Suine. “And that is a very beautiful thing.”

This story appeared in The Pride Issue of WISH, which celebrates the game-changers who are shaping Australia into a more diverse and inclusive society. Explore the digital edition here.