How James and Hayley Baillie are Rebuilding Their Dream

The fire that razed Kangaroo Island’s Southern Ocean Lodge was no match for the passion of its creators.

James and Hayley Baillie will never forget where they were on 3 January 2020, when they learnt their globally acclaimed Southern Ocean Lodge on South Australia’s Kangaroo Island (Karta Pintingga) was about to be swallowed up by a raging bushfire.

“It’s seared into our brains,” says James, who founded luxury accommodation outfit Baillie Lodges with Hayley in 2003. The couple had been diving off Lord Howe Island – home of their “firstborn”, Capella Lodge – when they received a message that “Southern Ocean Lodge is evacuating”. All through that night, until the mobile phone towers collapsed, the couple talked to six staff members,  including long-time lodge managers Alison Heath and John Hird, who had sought refuge in a bunker below the hotel’s lobby. “It was incredibly stressful,” recalls James. “We lost [all communication] and it wasn’t until later that evening that we knew they were safe.”

James chartered a flight to the island, a “zoo without fences” seven times the size of Singapore that sits 14 kilometres off the SA coast. From the air, the scene was apocalyptic. Almost the entire western half of the island was – or had been – ablaze, claiming two lives, destroying homes, farms and some tourism facilities and killing tens of thousands of animals. “I remember the smell of smoke as I came through the clouds,” he recalls, “and seeing that the lodge was still on fire.”

With the exception of some random items and part of the staff quarters, the 21-suite monument to the Baillies’ famed “relaxed luxury” ethos was razed to the ground. “There was so much of us in the lodge,” says James, who in the aftermath of the fire found himself bursting into tears on lone morning jogs. “Its DNA was us.”

When the shock wore off, the conviction to rebuild kicked in. Next month, almost four years after it was lost, Southern Ocean Lodge will once again welcome guests to its exquisitely untamed corner of the world. At $60 million, the cost is three times what it was for the original build. While the footprint is largely the same, the Baillies and Kangaroo Island-born architect Max Pritchard, who also designed the original lodge, have added another four guest suites and orientated them all to maximise the outlook. “Now, instead of them all having incredible ocean views, they have incredible ocean, clifftop and pounding-wave views of the beach below,” says James.

Another addition, he says, is a four-bedroom Ocean Pavilion that stands alone on a “windswept but incredibly dramatic” clifftop. “One of the decisions we made very early on was not to be arrogant but to go, ‘What was great and what wasn’t so great? What could we do better?’”

Out of that process emerged a no-brainer: the gloriously curved Great Room, with its original Gyrofocus fireplace (salvaged from the ash) and sweeping vistas across the Southern Ocean, will look “uncannily the same as it was”, says Hayley. Even Sunshine, a locally sculpted metal kangaroo that survived the fire, “goes back into his pride of place” in the room, she says. “His eyes melted but he’s had new ones made on the island.”

From practical help after the blaze to restaurant produce and décor, locals feature heavily in the property’s story. “So many of our suppliers – the honey, the lamb, the wine, the gin – are excited about the lodge coming back,” says Hayley. Award-winning KI artist Janine Mackintosh spent days amid the rubble after the fire collecting objects for a large installation and she’s also made mandalas, using island flora, that will hang in each guest suite.

Southern Ocean Lodge did, after all, help put Kangaroo Island on the international travel map (in January, The New York Times listed the island at number seven on its top 52 places to visit in 2023). “I think the local people have, for many years, generally understood the importance of Southern Ocean Lodge,” says James, “both in terms of its pin-up status for Kangaroo Island tourism and the trickle down effect.”

Tourism Australia managing director Phillipa Harrison agrees that the retreat “has icon status among the global luxury travel community”. Its rebirth, she says, “puts not only Kangaroo Island but also Australia on luxury travellers’ must-do lists”.

The Baillies first opened Southern Ocean Lodge in 2008, straight into the GFC meltdown. They both had backgrounds in tourism – Hayley, daughter of businessman Dick Smith, created immersive experiences for international travellers and James ran P&O’s Australian resorts – and this was their second venture after Lord Howe Island’s Capella. Friends thought they were crazy to build a high-end stay on a wild and remote part of the island. “‘Where’s Kangaroo Island? Why would anyone want to go there?’ But we built it and they came,” says James. “They” included Australian travellers drawn to the concept of all-inclusive “soft-adventure” and an influx of overseas guests, such as tech billionaire Bill Gates and his philanthropist then-wife, Melinda.

What followed for Baillie Lodges was a suite of prestige properties including Longitude 131º at Uluru-Kata Tjuta, Silky Oaks Lodge in Queensland’s Daintree Rainforest (Kaba Kada) and, more recently, The Louise in the Barossa Valley. Just over a year before the fire, Hayley and James sold Baillie Lodges to United States private-equity firm KSL Capital Partners but remain creative directors of the company. They’ve since acquired Chile’s Tierra Hotels group for a portfolio that also includes Clayoquot Wilderness Lodge on Canada’s Vancouver Island and Huka Lodge in New Zealand.

And now there’s Southern Ocean Lodge. James still has the boots he was wearing when he reached what had been the couple’s field of dreams two days after the property was wiped out. The soles have melted but they are a reminder of “the resilience of so many other people and the hard work and passion” that went into the first Southern Ocean Lodge, the efforts to save it and the sumptuous near replica that, like Kangaroo Island itself, has risen defiantly from the ashes.

SEE ALSO: 15 Incredible Things to Do on Kangaroo Island