THE OWNERS TRANSFORMED KERIKERI’S OLDEST MOTEL WITH GORGEOUS SUBTROPICAL PLANTS
When Bill and Paul Schwass bought the oldest motel in Kerikeri to transform into boutique accommodation, they used what Bill calls “the old cliché of paint and plant” to bring it into the present day. It worked and Stay Kerikeri was recently named the best redeveloped accommodation in New Zealand’s premier hospitality awards.
They bought the property three years ago – a tired motel with not much more garden than a lawn, a few elderly plants and two existing bangalow palms. They ran it for a year, worked out what they were going to do with it, and then closed for renovations inside and out.
“I was aware that the garden needed a theme and that it needed to be ‘of Kerikeri’,” says Bill. “We wanted to draw attention to it in a commercial sense, but Kerikeri is not a neon lights sort of place, so to make it dynamic, we needed to plant in bulk and to keep it simple. The plan was to have a point of difference in the market and create something people would talk about, something they don’t do at home.”
Certainly, most people do not plant close to a hundred bromeliads in their own front garden, although they might well be tempted after seeing how dramatic it can look.
Although their previous gardens had been largely native, subtropical planting fitted what the couple wanted for the motel. Their branding featured hibiscus, so they planted lots of them and used them in the rooms, but the standout plants in the scheme are the bromeliads planted with palms on the street side of the property.
“I didn’t know anything about bromeliads until I saw them all massed together at a local nursery and realised they would give us that sculptural, wellplanned look that would really grab attention,” explains Bill.
They were planted with three varieties of palm – kentia, bangalow and Dypsis baronii.
Bill toyed with the idea of using a ground cover underneath but decided to keep it black to show off the bromeliads and to continue a relationship with the newly black-painted buildings.
He used dark mulch from the local mulch guru and mounded up the beds to give the gardens a shapeliness. The mulch also helps to retain moisture and suppress weeds, with the result that the bromeliads require minimum care. All they need is to have their lower leaves removed once a year. Bill’s definitely a convert.