Slice of haven
Explore a tranquil corner of the NSW coast from a luxurious new base.
Chefs need to have serious confidence in their cooking to set tables without salt and pepper. These two essentials are conspicuously absent from the blondewood tables at Bangalay Dining, part of Shoalhaven’s new high-end accommodation, Bangalay Luxury Villas. They’re adorned with little more than cutlery and a small duck-egg blue vase of gnarly eucalyptus and myrtle twigs.
I put this bold move to the test by ordering the spanner crab entree, which the menu tells me comes with fennel, apple and blackened blood lime. Under-salted crab is dreary and nothing will give me a better idea of whether or not setting tables sans seasoning is a smart idea. The crab arrives, a pretty pile of opaque white meat jumbled with salad garnish. I take a bite. The seasoning is bang-on. The dish, created by the steady hand of the restaurant’s executive chef, Brent Strong, is a delight.
Over the rest of my two-day stay at Bangalay, which sits just behind Seven Mile Beach at Shoalhaven Heads, about two hours’ drive south of Sydney, it becomes clear this low-key self-assuredness is a hallmark of the property. Each of the one, two and four-bedroom villas is clad in black steel and red ironbark wood; the latter will eventually weather into a dusty worn grey and blend artfully into its sandy bushland setting. Walls are decorated with knobbly wreaths made from native grasses and seedpods designed by Marina Strode, an artist affectionately known as “the Community Pruner” because of her love of using whatever cuttings she can forage from bushland or the backyards of obliging neighbours. Even the adjoining Shoalhaven Heads Golf Course, which can be viewed from eight of the 16 villas, looks less like formal fairways than a neat clearing between banksia bushes. And the property’s pool, surrounded by an unvarnished wooden walkway and sitting beneath mature blackbutt eucalypts, has the feel of a natural billabong.
“We don’t want it to seem like it’s trying too hard; we wanted the whole place to sit very lightly on the land,” says co-owner and interior designer Michelle Bishop, who opened Bangalay with her builder husband Tom in September last year.
Bangalay’s location was an inspired choice. Although the property doesn’t directly face the magnificent Seven Mile Beach, it’s a mere 40m away across a cul-de-sac (you can also get there via a slightly longer but infinitely more scenic route along a bushland path). And it’s the perfect base to access everywhere else you’d want to be in Shoalhaven, a region that stretches about 130km along the NSW coast from Shoalhaven Heads to Durras, just before Batemans Bay in the south.
The area also includes some of the state’s prettiest inland towns, such as Kangaroo Valley and Berry, but the name I tap into my GPS the next morning rarely wins any picturesque points. Nowra, with its unremarkable suburban streets and hulking great shopping centre, isn’t considered much of a tourist drawcard, but that’s probably because most tourists don’t know about Hyper Hyper Coffee, a black-painted hole-in-the-wall in the town’s centre. If they did, and if they shared my passion for smooth, toasty, strong coffee, they’d head there too.
Fortified with caffeine, we head another 60km south to the chocolate-box town of Milton and spend the morning browsing its antique stores and luxe lifestyle boutiques, filled with scented candles and hand-knitted chunky wool throws. The Heritage Bakery provides tasty late-morning snacks in the form of flaky sausage rolls; their pastry is made daily on-site and their savoury fillings sourced from legendary local butchers, Milton District Meats.
In the afternoon we wander unhurriedly back up the coast, making a leisurely detour past the quiet seaside village of Currarong, which sits on a nubbin of a peninsula just southeast of Nowra. We park the car at the entrance to Abrahams Bosom Beach and amble along the 2.5km Wreck Walk loop, past the remaining rusty chunks of the SS Merimbula, which ran aground in turbulent seas in 1928. It’s too early for whales during our visit but the horizon would be frothing with marine mammals by now.
From there we continue north to the quiet fishing village of Greenwell Point. A stroll along the foreshore suggests no one lives here except a couple of pelicans. That is until we head to one of our favourite secret spots on the entire coast: the tumbledown shack that contains the shopfront for Jim Wild’s Oyster Co.
My partner and I discovered Jim by happy accident on our first weekend away together many years ago and we’ve been low-key obsessed with the booming “Happy shucking!” greeting he gives customers ever since (we mimic it every time we eat an oyster). I dream about the Sydney rock oysters he grows on his leases on the Crookhaven River, which have a minerally, briny, creamy complexity that surpasses any others oysters I’ve tried.
We buy a shucked half-dozen so we can eat them right away, but if you’re saving them for later, the tip is to buy them un-shucked so they retain their natural liquor, or juice. Jim won’t let you buy one of the professional shuckers he and his team use — an amateur could take their hand off — but he has less lethal ones for sale and will happily give you a lesson before you leave. That night we rug up against the buffeting South Coast winds and drive inland to Berry, which looks like a Christmas card; all cosy, twinkly lights from restaurants packed with people. Dinner is waiting at South on Albany, described by one local as “a Berry institution”, a 45-seater inside a quaint brick cottage just off Queen Street, the town’s main road.
Owner Sonia Greig is as warm as the night outside is cold, beaming with genuine enthusiasm as she talks us through the menu. Her husband, John Evans, formerly of Sydney Merivale heavyweights Bistro CBD and Est, is behind the stove and the food he starts sending out is supremely good.
The roast beetroot and carrot salad studded with ricotta from Kiama micro-dairy Pines is more flavourful than a salad has any right to be, the slab of meaty kingfish caught that day is on point.
I’m bewitched by a syrupy mandarin cake made with citrus from a local grower who Sonia says also supplies the restaurant with bananas and pineapples — astonishingly, without the aid of a greenhouse.
“He sits in this tiny little micro-climate that somehow manages to grow tropical fruits on the NSW South Coast,” Sonia says.
There’s nothing tropical about the iciness of the night as we head back to Bangalay; the car’s temperature gauge tells us it’s 11C outside but the wind that whips us as we scurry back to our wooden cocoon would have us believe it’s more like five. But our little Bangalay bolthole is toasty as a mitten; the fire roars to life in a heartbeat.
The beauty of this property, I think as I defrost, is it invites you so beautifully into its surrounding environment but also shuts you safely away from it when it counts.
Alex Carlton was a guest of Destination NSW and Bangalay Luxury Villas.
-
MORE TO THE STORY
I have a theory about wineries. Many of the best aren’t found in traditional wine country. My thinking is that when there’s less competition for bums on seats, the owners can relax more into their personal style and worry less about the rivals next door. With only eight wineries, Shoalhaven isn’t a well-known wine hotspot but that’s why visiting one of its welcoming wineries is such a good idea.
Cupitt’s Winery (pictured), just outside Milton, should be top of the list. Each part of the business is managed by a different Cupitt family member; one son, Wally, makes the estate’s rotating selection of cool-climate wines using grapes from all over NSW. Another son, Tom, is the general manager. Matriarch Rosie oversees the fromagerie with help from assistant Angel Williams, who trained at Australia’s two churches of cheesemaking: Pyengana in Tasmania and Holy Goat Cheese in Victoria. The family atmosphere makes a visit feel intimate and understated. The property is 95 per cent sustainable — they even make their own charcoal and fertilise the kitchen garden from the on-site worm farm — and chef Russell Chin uses as much local produce as he can.
“The whole thing was built sort of bit by bit, with no real plan,” explains Wally. “And that’s kind of how we like doing things.”
Over at Cambewarra Estate, 8km northwest of Nowra, ex-Sydneysider Amanda Cole took over the family business in 2016 with her husband Brett, and stumbled on to the winery’s biggest drawcard almost by accident. A photography enthusiast, she was busy setting up a photoshoot of a high tea among the property’s grapevines when a passing bride-to-be asked if she could book a high tea for her wedding party.
“I told her, ‘Oh yes of course’, and then panicked. We didn’t offer high tea. Where on earth was I going to get everything I needed for one?” Thankfully the universe, and the local classifieds, intervened and Amanda happened upon a woman selling an entire high tea business, from mismatched vintage china to floral tablecloths to cake stands.
“I took the lot,” Amanda says. Now platters of dainty macarons, scones and finger sandwiches, served with delicate teas that Amanda blends, are held on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, and are the winery’s most popular attraction.
-
IN THE KNOW
Bangalay Luxury Villas is in Shoalhaven Heads. Prices for one-bedroom garden view villas start at $350 a night while one-bedroom golf course view villas start at $370 a night. Two-bedroom suites cost $470 a night and the four-bedroom holiday house is $615 a night.