NO TIME TO REST
WHEN LIFE TOOK AN UNEXPECTED TURN FOR SARAH ANDREWS, A TINY TASMANIAN SHACK BECAME THE SPRINGBOARD FOR A GLOBAL BUSINESS.
WHILE LIVING IN ALICE SPRINGS FOUR YEARS AGO, scientistturned-designer Sarah Andrews bought a copy of Country Style magazine. As she flicked through its pages she stopped on a travel feature about Tasmania’s west coast. “They described it as ‘barren, windswept and the end of the earth’, and I thought, ‘That sounds perfect.’” She started looking at real estate in the area and found a tiny, rundown fisherman’s shack that had been pictured in the article. It had been on the market for five years and she bought it sight unseen, figuring she could turn it into a holiday house for herself when she needed a break from her intense career working with organisations including NASA and the London Olympics. But her plans for a personal bolthole were thrown into upheaval when she was hit with an unexpected divorce and a serious health diagnosis in the same week. All of a sudden, her holiday house needed to pay her bills.
And so Captains Rest was born, and within months her now artfully renovated and beautifully styled shack on a little bay in one of the most isolated regions of Tasmania was one of the most successful properties on Airbnb, gaining interest (and back-to-back bookings) from around the world. “I became so successful so quickly and that just hadn’t been seen before,” she says, from in front of an open fire at her Tasmanian home. “Within months, Captains Rest was competing with the big guys and people started reaching out to me for advice.” She began working with other holiday property owners, applying her unique blend of science and design skills to help them create new properties or improve existing ones. “I was putting their input into my process and pretty soon I couldn’t handle all the work. And people who wanted to work with me couldn’t necessarily afford to have me fly in and work with them for a week or so.”
So, in 2018, using her background in university teaching and within organisations, she ran three two-day hosting courses – in Queensland, Victoria and Tasmania – thinking that would be the end of it. “The classes quickly sold out,” says Sarah proudly. “Of the 40 people who attended, they all became incredibly successful. This wasn’t woo-woo stuff. I taught my methods and structured it all with my science background. These three classes kickstarted my career because there was just so much demand from people wanting to learn how to create and run a successful Airbnb property.”
Face-to-face classes turned into an online offering and then, when COVID hit, she created a six-week Zoom course she feels is her most valuable offering yet. “It takes time to implement what I teach, and during COVID people had extra time to be developing their properties for whatever came next,” Sarah explains. And she’s overjoyed students have been seeing significant changes. “I get emails all the time telling me their profits have doubled or tripled, or that people have been able to quit their jobs and focus on this full-time.” Students’ properties, including Whalesong Shack and Ethelmont Rise in Tasmania and The Eltham in NSW, have featured in the pages of this magazine as well as others, including Vogue Living, House & Garden UK, and Living Etc. “What I teach, I can teach to anyone to make the best of the property they’ve got,” she says. “All my students have taken the time to educate themselves in the hosting business and it’s hats off to them. Their success is not luck, it’s hard work.”
Visit thehostingmasterclass.com and captainsrest.com