Everyone was looking forward to Capella’s opening day. The first guests were on their way flying in the QantasLink Dash 8 aircraft booked, the team was ready. In choosing the day for opening, no one could have known that it might ultimately coincide with the AFL Grand Final and even less so that Libby’s favourite team for a lifetime – the Adelaide Crows – would be playing!
With guests arriving any minute no one was allowed to watch the game. And as luck would have it, it was the only grand final game to date that the Crows have won! It must have been a sign of good luck to Capella for the future.
Alison Heath, who in years to come would become General Manager of Southern Ocean Lodge, was ‘very busy’ cleaning Capella’s Subaru ready to collect guests from the airport and secretly listening to the game on the radio!
Libby said she just remembers bringing those first guests to the lodge and they were blown away, as everyone was.
The young Finn Baillie, James and Hayley’s toddler was a key player and mischief-maker in Capella’s early days. Mark remembers Libby and him coming back to the island from holidays and wondering why the VCR (“video cassette recorder”) wasn’t working. Finn had posted some toast inside. Very funny. James remembers Finn dancing on the bar counter and the other Lord Howe children hanging from the fishhook scales in their sleeping hammocks.
And James and Hayley remember working on the planning and design of the next property, Southern Ocean Lodge whilst relief managing Capella when Mark and Libby were away…
Capella’s opening also signified the beginning of Baillie Lodges, created by the life and business partnership of James and Hayley and which would go on to include in its collection some of Australia’s most lauded luxury lodges including flagship Southern Ocean Lodge on Kangaroo Island, Longitude 131° at Uluru-Kata Tjuta, Silky Oaks Lodge in Queensland’s Daintree Rainforest, The Louise in the Barossa Valley, New Zealand’s iconic Huka Lodge and Clayoquot Wilderness Lodge in Vancouver Island’s magnificent wilderness. And the rest as they say, is history.
Congratulations and cheers to Capella!
For more information about Capella Lodge
and the other properties in the Baillie Lodges
portfolio please download our brochure.
