Lake House

In 1984, on a slope running down to Lake Daylesford, Alla and Allan Wolf-Tasker opened a small restaurant in a country town then better known for mineral water and tired guesthouses than for cooking. Lake House, in Daylesford in central Victoria, grew from that dining room into a hotel with rooms, a spa and gardens reaching to the water's edge, and it is still run by the family that built it.

History

Alla Wolf-Tasker, the chef, and Allan Wolf-Tasker, a painter, bought the land when the district was out of fashion. Their idea was a restaurant that cooked with produce from the surrounding countryside, at a time when ambitious dining in Australia leaned on imported ingredients and city addresses. Alla spent years building a network of local growers, farmers and cheesemakers, and many small producers in the region owe their first regular customer to her kitchen. The restaurant became one of the most influential regional dining rooms in the country and is widely credited with helping to turn Daylesford and Hepburn Springs into a destination for food as well as bathing.

Rooms were added over the following years, then the spa, so that Lake House became a full country hotel rather than a restaurant with beds. Alla has written books on the house and its cooking, and has long spoken for regional food in Australia.

Architecture and design

The buildings are low and spread through gardens beside the lake, with lawns, mature trees and paths down to the shore. Rooms are set in separate wings rather than a single block, so that most look over the gardens or the water. Allan's large, colourful canvases hang throughout the public rooms and give the house much of its character.

Rooms and suites

Accommodation runs from garden rooms to larger suites by the water with their own terraces looking across the lake. Some have fireplaces, which count for a great deal in Daylesford winters, when frost is common and the town fills with visitors for the bathhouses.

Dining

The restaurant is still the centre of the house, a long room with windows over the lake. The cooking follows the seasons and the producers of the district, with vegetables, meat and cheese from the surrounding valleys and hills, and the wine list gives Victoria's regions a large share of the pages. Breakfast is served in the same room, and on warm days lunch moves out onto the terrace.

Wellness

Salus, the spa, sits among the trees in the gardens. Its name is the Latin for health, and its treatments draw on the mineral-water tradition of the area, with private bathing as well as massage and facials.

Weddings and events

Lake House hosts weddings and private celebrations, with ceremonies in the gardens by the lake and receptions in its private dining rooms. It also takes small conferences and company retreats, which make use of the restaurant and the spa.

Location

Daylesford grew out of the gold rush of the 1850s. Swiss and Italian settlers, many from the canton of Ticino, recognised the value of its springs, and the Daylesford and Hepburn Springs district holds the largest concentration of mineral springs in Australia. Bathing has drawn visitors from Melbourne since the late nineteenth century, and the Hepburn Bathhouse still operates a few kilometres from the hotel. Lake Daylesford, on whose shore Lake House stands, is a small lake ringed by walking tracks, and the Wombat Hill Botanic Gardens look down on the town from the hill above.

Melbourne is about an hour and a half away by car, and Melbourne Airport at Tullamarine a little closer. As a luxury hotel in Daylesford, Lake House is less about the rooms than about the kitchen that started it all and the local food economy that grew up around it.