300 acres of living Vanuatu.

From waterfront to escarpment country.

A large part of what visitors see today owes much to Mal Hood, an expatriate who understood that a place like this could only really be built with people who knew how to work with the island rather than against it. Mal introduced us to Brightly, from the Banks Islands, and around Brightly grew a remarkable team of young men whose practical skills were exceptional. They could look at steep ground, coral, timber and vegetation and somehow see the finished work before it existed. Their hand is everywhere. The walkways that climb the hill, the extraordinary coral-stone masonry, the way the buildings and paths sit into the contours of the land, and much of the planting that now feels as though it has always been there all came from that period of work. Coconuts were established, avocado planted, cocoa developed, and the productive plantation gradually became woven together with the rainforest and older island vegetation. That history is important because Freshwater was never conceived as accommodation surrounded by tropical landscaping. The plantation came first. The gardens, trees, stonework, tracks, productive areas, rainforest the cave are the place itself. Accommodation has simply been fitted into it. The result is something increasingly difficult to manufacture: a property that feels established because it is established. The coral walls have wRestauranthered, the trees have grown, the cocoa produces, the paths lead somewhere, and beyond the cultivated ground the landscape eventually gives way to Aore’s remarkable rainforest. Freshwater has grown with the island over time, shaped by the people who worked here and by the skills they brought with them. That is why staying at Freshwater feels different. You are living for a while inside a working piece of Vanuatu.