About
An old guesthouse, slowly rebuilt
Merrow House was built for people who came to the hills to take the waters. It closed, emptied and waited. We spent four years putting it back together, slowly and mostly by hand, and opened the doors again for slow weekends.
The house
Built to
take the waters
The house went up at the end of the nineteenth century, when the springs drew visitors from Melbourne by the trainload, and it ran as a guesthouse for the better part of a century. By the time we found it, it had been empty for twenty years.
We kept what we could: the sash windows, the cellar, the garden walls and the roof timbers. We took out what had been added in the 1970s, and put back what had been lost, using the same kinds of materials it was built with in the first place.
The design
Four materials,
used well
No feature walls, no televisions and nothing that will date. The rooms are built from a short list of honest materials, and they get better with use.
Lime plaster
Hand-trowelled in the colour of the local clay. It breathes, softens the light and never needs painting.
Recycled timber
Messmate and ash floors from a demolished wool store, and the old attic beams, kept where we found them.
Brick and stone
The garden walls are the old brick, mended with bricks salvaged on site. Steps, paths and the new terraces are local stone.
Washed linen
Every bed is dressed in linen, washed soft, with wool blankets for the cold months.
Our footprint
What we do,
and what we don't yet
Only things we can measure or show you. If you’d like the numbers behind any of them, ask at reception.
What we do
- Solar panels on the north-facing roofs supply about a third of the power we use across a year; we buy the rest as accredited GreenPower.
- Rainwater tanks hold 90,000 litres for the garden, the toilets and the laundry.
- No single-use bottles or miniatures in the rooms: filtered water in glass, bath products in refillable ceramic dispensers.
- Kitchen scraps go to the compost bays behind the walled garden, and the compost goes back on the beds.
- Two EV chargers in the car park, free for house guests.
- On stays of three nights or more, we change sheets and towels when you ask, not by default.
What we don’t do yet
- Most of our guests still arrive by car. We meet the coach for anyone who doesn't, and write about how to do it.
- The kitchen still has two gas burners we cook on; they'll be replaced with induction by the end of 2027.
- We don't hold a sustainability certification. We would rather show you what we do than a badge.
The people
A small team
who live nearby
Eighteen of us run the house, the kitchen and the garden, and most of us live within twenty minutes of the front door. We’d rather know your name than give you a number.
Get in touch
About this website
Merrow House is not a real hotel. This site was designed and built by Meridian Websites to show what a custom website for a boutique hotel can do: a booking flow, room pages with floor plans, a local guide with a drawn map, and journal articles written to be useful. The rooms, prices, people and contact details are invented; the places nearby are real.