Melissa Hoyer
Just under an hour from Sydney, where the bush gives way to the Hawkesbury and the Central Coast properly begins, Saddles Mount White is about to get a lot bigger.
This spring, The Grand Saddles Lodge opens its doors – 20 private villas, a restaurant, a piano bar and a day spa, all conceived by the man who never met a hospitality project he didn’t want to put his name on – the always enterprising John Singleton.
If you know of Saddles, you know The Homestead – the restaurant across the road that Condé Nast Traveller once called one of the world’s most beautiful. The Lodge is the natural next move: take a much-loved local haunt and turn it into somewhere you can actually stay.
Michelle Leslie and White + Dickson Architects have done the design honours – and how gorgeous does it look – and the brief was clearly “make people forget Sydney exists the moment they arrive.”
A winding driveway through native bush leads to a glass-domed entrance, then sandstone, spotted gum and brass inside – the sort of interior that wants you to know it was made by hand, and mostly was, by Central Coast craftspeople and artists. The villas each get a fireplace, a private terrace and a plunge pool, because apparently one pool per person is now the going rate for “retreat.”
There’s also a communal infinity pool for anyone who prefers their pools shared.
Dinner is at the restaurant inside the main building – local seafood, organic beef and poultry, wine list doing the sensible thing and mixing Australian with international, produce coming out of the on-site gardens.
Then, because a lodge in 2026 apparently isn’t complete without one, there’s Ned’s: an Art Deco piano bar with a grand piano at its centre, live jazz, proper martinis and the kind of bar plates designed to be lingered over rather than rushed.
(It’s the bit of the media release that made me want to book a room purely to sit at that bar.) For anyone who wants to do more than eat and drink beautifully – and some people, astonishingly, do – there’s a five-room spa with saunas, ice baths and treatments built around native botanicals.
Beyond the property, there are walking trails, oyster farms and the Hawkesbury River itself, with the Lodge team apparently on hand to build you an itinerary rather than leave you to a brochure.
Put it all together – The Lodge, The Homestead, The Barn, The Caravan – and Saddles has quietly become a full precinct rather than a very good restaurant with a car park. Bookings open this spring. Watch this space. You can check Saddles out here.
*Photos by Ryan Linnegar
