Your hosts
Hosting runs in the family, so to speak. After long careers across sales, service and hospitality, we were simply waiting for the right excuse to leave the corporate grind and city living behind, and build a small luxury hotel of our own.
We found this house in 2018 and fell for it almost immediately — the property, the garden, the quiet street. It was obvious this was the place to build the life we'd been planning. Not long after, we packed up our apartment in Singapore and moved to Hepburn Springs, which we're now proud to call home.
Between us, we've stayed in almost every kind of accommodation the world offers, from sprawling resorts to one-room guesthouses — and kept coming back to the smaller, more personal stays, especially the ones that made real use of their surroundings. That's the template we borrowed for Highfield Retreat: relaxed, understated, distinctly Australian, with a deliberate layer of comfort on top.
We want Highfield Retreat to be more than a place people pass through — a destination in its own right, somewhere guests can properly switch off and enjoy being looked after. We hope your stay gives you as much as hosting you gives us.
— Marcus & Felix
Marcus L.
Marcus started out driving tour coaches as a teenager, which led to a role with a major vehicle manufacturer and, eventually, an eighteen-year career spread across five countries. His final posting was Singapore, before he finally came home to Victoria and chased the one job he'd always wanted — running a hotel of his own.
Felix L.
Trained formally in hospitality, Felix's love of guest service began with his first job as a Guest Relations Officer back in Singapore. A long run with a major airline carried him through public relations, retail, marketing and training, before returning to hotel operations with an international brand. Sharing Marcus's ambition for a business of their own, the two joined forces and took over Highfield Retreat in early 2019.