Stay Awhile Magazine

Gird your coffee table: the Stay Awhile Full Collection is on sale. ☕️

All 6 volumes of our independent slow travel magazine are $149 ($204 bought separately) for a very limited time.

That’s every issue from Volume 01 to Volume 06: more than 900 pages of unforgettable places, local experiences and the untold stories behind them, across Australia & Aotearoa New Zealand.

It’s travel inspiration you can hold, devoted to places and spaces with soul. Boutique stays, off-grid cabins and design-led retreats, yes, but also the tables, trails and local makers worth planning a trip around. Printed, thick, and made to be kept.

✔️ Six collectible print volumes
✔️ Free shipping to Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand
✔️ $55 less than buying the six volumes separately
✔️ International shipping now available to the UK, US and Germany

The sale ends Wednesday 21 October.

Tap the link in our bio to shop the Full Collection, or comment COLLECTION and we’ll send you the link

Palm Springs, but make it the wild west coast of the Eyre Peninsula. Add a rust-red beach house, the Southern Ocean out front and sunsets that turn almost violently orange.

Mount Camel Beach House is an off-grid coastal stay set on a 250-acre conservation property near Venus Bay, South Australia, with barely another soul in sight.

The Palm Springs vibe continues inside, with vintage furniture, art, colour and collected pieces filling the two-bedroom house. Eclectic, cool and completely unexpected on this wild stretch of the South Australian coast.

There’s no Wi-Fi or phone reception, and we meant it when we say that. The closest phone signal is a ten minute drive down the road.

Exhale.

The house runs off-grid on solar power and rainwater, while the surrounding property remains gloriously untamed.

Perfect for anyone planning a road trip near along the eyre peninsula coastline, this coastal stay combines the remoteness of off-grid South Australia with some serious design personality.

📍 Stay Awhile 🐪 MOUNT CAMEL BEACH CONSERVATION ESTATE
📸 Stefanie Ash

Someone put a tiny cabin on the edge of a cliff in Taranaki. Which begs the obvious question, when can we stay?

This off-grid coastal cabin in Pihama, Taranaki, on Aotearoa New Zealand’s North Island sits above the wild west coast in all its dramatic glory.

The cabin itself is refreshingly simple. One bedroom, whitewashed timber, a king bed and big windows looking across farmland and ocean. Nothing fighting for attention when that is happening outside.

The outdoor bath sits on the clifftop deck, completely exposed to the sea and sky, with waves breaking below and a wild stretch of Taranaki coastline disappearing into the distance. We can think of worse places to spend an afternoon.

It’s off-grid, solar powered and sleeps two, making it an easy addition to a Taranaki road trip — although once you’re here, leaving may be the flaw in that plan.

📍 Stay Awhile The Nest — Taranaki, NZ
📸 Shane Boulton

Save this clifftop cabin for your next New Zealand North Island getaway.

Turns out old barns and farm sheds make exceptionally good bathrooms.

Across some of our favourite Australian boutique stays, former working barns, stables and sheds are being given a second life as bathhouses. Old timber, exposed rafters, stone, enormous tubs and plenty of history still showing around the edges.

At Timber Barn, the old shed aesthetic gets a waterside setting on the Shoalhaven River, while Magnolias on Mernda gives its own former farm building a new reason to stick around.

At Findon Farm, an old barn has become a bathing space with its rural bones still firmly intact. And Hillview Stables takes the idea back to 1887, transforming the property’s original coach house and stables into a Western-inspired bathhouse, complete with a rather enormous stone tub.

There’s something we love about keeping these old structures in the story. The wonky beams, weathered timber and years of farm life haven’t been erased. They’ve simply acquired much better plumbing.

From barn to bathhouse. We definitely approve.

Featuring:
Timber Barn Wandering Escapes
📍 Boutique Accommodation - Dandenong Ranges 📸 Nick Skinner
📍 Findon Farm 📸 Hannah Puechmarin
📍 H i l l v i e w 1887 📸 KRISTA EPPELSTUN

Of course Lucy Fenton’s beach house looks like this.

An ’80s retro beach house in Anglesea on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road, this boutique stay is owned and designed by FENTON & FENTON creative director Lucy Fenton . If you know Lucy’s interiors, the colour, art and general refusal to be beige will come as no surprise.

The original house came with plenty worth keeping: soaring ceilings, exposed beams, timber panelling, brick, cork floors and some gloriously brown kitchen tiles. Instead of renovating the ’80s out of it, Lucy leaned in, adding flashes of ’70s colour, vintage finds, rattan, velvet, stripes and an excellent amount of orange.

The result is nostalgic without becoming a time capsule. Four bedrooms, two living rooms, a wood fire, a bar and an outdoor shower for the post-surf rinse. It sleeps nine, making it an easy pick for a summer weekend getaway on the Great Ocean Road with a house full of friends.

And despite being the work of one of Australia’s best-known interiors people, it still feels like an Aussie beach house. Chilled and delightfully unpretentious.

📍 Stay Awhile The Sundowner, Anglesea
📸 Eve Wilson

Plot twist: there’s a speakeasy under the floorboards.

From the outside, Wandarra Homestead looks every bit the Mudgee country escape: 25 acres, wide verandahs, kangaroos on the lawn and rolling countryside stretching towards Elephant Mountain.

Then you lift a hatch in the hallway.

Hidden underneath the homestead is Grandma’s Tipsy, a moody little underground bar named after owners Angela and Jodie Harber’s grandmother, who lived to 101 and, by all accounts, knew her way around a celebration. Frankly, an excellent legacy.

The sisters brought this 1980s homestead back to life with warm, earthy interiors, a huge stone fireplace and plenty of room for everyone to pile in for the weekend. There are four bedrooms, long tables made for opening another bottle, and a firepit outside with 360-degree views across the countryside.

And because this is Mudgee w**e country, there are cellar doors and long lunches waiting when you eventually decide to leave. Or you could stay put, descend back through the hatch and see what Grandma would have done.

We suspect we know.

📍 Stay Awhile Luxury Accommodation in Mudgee NSW
📸 Kaity B | Airbnb Content Creaton + Social Media Help

You can build a sleek, design-led cabin in many places. You cannot manufacture that backdrop.

Meet Pā Point, a brand new off-grid cabin near Dunedin, on Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island. A small black structure tucked into the trees high above the Otago coastline, with a front-row seat to the Pacific stretching far out in front of it.

And we do mean front row.

Almost an entire wall has been handed over to the view. There’s warm timber overhead, dark panelling, oak underfoot and a suspended fireplace planted squarely between two enormous windows, because apparently staring at the ocean wasn’t quite cosy enough.

Outside, things are pared back. There’s a deck cantilevered towards the coast and a cedar hot tub sitting among the trees, with very little to interrupt proceedings beyond the occasional wave rolling into the bay below.

It feels wonderfully dwarfed by its surroundings. And that’s probably why we love it so much.

Aotearoa New Zealand does off-grid cabins outrageously well. Pā Point has just raised the bar.

📍 Stay Awhile Pā Point

Okay, we missed one.

After our Great Aussie Beach Shack roundup this week, there was one Tasmanian shack we immediately wished we’d squeezed in.

Built in 1970 and sitting across the road from the water on Bruny Island, it has all the things we love about the Australian beach shack: simple bones, big windows, timber, sea views and absolutely no desire to pretend it’s something it isn’t.

Inside, everything takes on the golden tones of the island. Timber, earthy colours and late-afternoon sun, with huge windows keeping the water almost constantly in view.

There’s something about beach houses that still feel like a beach house. No enormous rebuild. No attempt to erase the era it came from. Just a 1970s shack on Bruny Island given enough attention to make staying in feel every bit as appealing as any luxury resort.

And on Bruny, that’s saying something.

Consider this our very important amendment to the Great Aussie Beach Shack list.

📍 Stay Awhile The Joneses
📷 Pauline Morrissey

Anyone other Aussie or Aotearoa beach shacks we missed? Drop suggestions below 👇🏼

The Great Australian Beach Shack is back! So we’ve rounded up some of our favourite beach shack stays around Australia to prove it.

From a pink Queensland classic to retro beach houses in WA, Tasmania, VIC and the NSW South Coast...these are beach houses that have kept the nostalgia and added enough considered design to make us want to move in for longer than a weekend. Good vibes necessary. Havianas optional.

📍Blush Beach Shack, Harvey Bay QLD
📍Silvermoon Shack, Blairegowie VIC Eve Wilson
📍Love and Mutiny, Yorke Peninsula WA
📍La Shack, Falcon WA Hannah Puechmarin
📍The Mook, Mollymook NSW
📍Nellie & The Sugar Shack, South Coast NSW Ish*ta
📍Blush Beach Shack, Harvey Bay QLD
📍Oystercatcher, Huskisson NSW Rose | Interior & Lifestyle Photographer + Videographer
📍Shack in the Dunes, Weymouth TAS Bec Willox ♡
📍Salt Shack, Bicheno TAS - Restituere
📍Waterview, Wombarra NSW Sophie Lou 

Follow Stay Awhile for boutique stays, places and experiences worth travelling for across Australia & Aotearoa.