23 Aug 2023
Words John Miller Informer 107

Mad dogs & Englishmen

On one of his many trips to the North Queensland town, Bone learned the town’s old mental hospital, Mosman Hall, was up for sale.

Opened in 1954, the asylum had laid idle since 2001 when Queensland Health closed it. The abandoned property sat on a sprawling 220-acre site just five minutes’ drive west of the city centre.

“No one knew what to do with the place when it closed, so no one gave a toss about it,” says Bone. “The idea was just to knock it down, strip out all the assets of any value and just leave it as a bare site.”

Bone and his partner Vanessa Stanley-Johns had a better idea. In 2006, they purchased Mosman Hall for $1,050,000 and have been working on realising their vision ever since. In 2012, they began work on the site and in 2016 reopened stage one — a suite of 15 luxury apartments for short-term guests. Mosman Hall became Kernow, the Cornish name for Cornwall where Bone hails from.

“I wanted to give this place a name in keeping with all the Cornish miners who came out to this part of Australia in the gold rush era of the 1870s, and who are buried in the local graveyard here,” says the 61-year-old. “It ties in with the fact that I’m a Cornishman too.”

Bone and Stanley-Johns spent $4.5m on the renovations of Kernow to refashion one of the asylum’s annexes into the 15 apartments.

They renamed that part of the property the Porkellis Wing, again in keeping with Bone’s roots — the Cornish village of Porkellis is Bone’s birthplace. The West Wing, another annexe of the property, offers hotel-style rooms and smaller self-contained apartments.

“What we’re trying to do is produce something different, an experience, as opposed to just another Conrad or Shangri-La.”

Bone says Kernow’s short-term accommodation comprises only 10 per cent of the overall project. The masterplan envisages a residential community of over 400 dwellings, as well as several large lagoons.

The main feature will be a 2.5-hectare crystal lagoon, the first phase of which is the holding dam for the works water supply.

This in itself will also be a major attraction, with beaches, Monet-style bridge and waterfalls.

“We don’t call it a hotel. We just called it Kernow,” says Bone. “The reason is it’s such a diverse project so we’re always trying not to be pigeonholed. Our product here is very different from a normal hotel product.”

Kernow has proved a massive hit. The property has won several coveted travel awards, including a 2020 TripAdvisor Travellers’ Choice Best of the Best award.

In the 2002 North Queensland Tourism and Events Awards, Kernow was runner up in the accommodation category to Townsville’s The Ville Resort-Casino, and runner up to Orpheus Island Lodge in the Highest Review Score – Accommodation category.

“Our reviews are very important to us,” says Bone. “On Booking.com we’re at 9.6, and we’re five stars on Tripadvisor.”

Bone says Kernow’s occupancy runs at a solid 70 per cent, which he’s aiming to raise to 85 to 90 per cent. Over two thirds of Kernow’s clientele is corporate and the rest a mix of grey nomads who have given up caravans and international travellers.

“We have several groups of international travellers who come here every year,” he says. “We have two parties, one from Switzerland, the other from Germany, who come every year for a couple of weeks and just love the place. We also have a small conference centre accommodating up to 50 people.

“We had four events in November last year ranging from corporate board meetings to health and safety meetings, to a lady’s sewing convention ... which was crazy.

“The irony is our busiest times is weekdays, our quiet time is weekends.

“That’s a major problem for Charters Towers itself because the town has been a bit slow in understanding that you’ve got to provide things for people to do on the weekend if you’re going to get them out here.

“Casino rivals Adelson and Wynn had this famous phrase, ‘Let’s not fight over people before they get here, let’s get them here and then fight over them.’

“What we’ve got to do as a town is get people here and then we can compete for their business.

“The real challenge is getting Charters Towers’ name out there and producing the inflow. To drag people away from the coast in Australia is still quite difficult.”

Bone did not have a cold start in the accommodation industry. His father was a hotelier in Falmouth, so he learned the hospitality business at his knee.

As an investment banker, who continues to run a private equity fund in Hong Kong to this day, he oversaw a couple of hotel projects in Port Douglas, which he used as a model for Kernow.

“We still had no idea whether Kernow would work,” he says. “The way we built it is that if it didn’t work, we could just sell the units.”

As for the renovations, Bone salvaged as much as possible from the old hospital. “We tried to keep as much as we could, which was the original ceilings, floors and walls.

“That said, taking an old building to new standards, which is what we did, is pretty tough. There’s practically nothing from the 1950s that is acceptable by today’s building standards. We had to do a material change of use for the entire scheme. That’s the reason it took six years to start construction work in 2012. We had to jump through all the hoops, all the planning rules and regulations.

“The carbon investment in the buildings itself, the embedded carbon value is huge. So, we’re very much trying to recycle everything, trying to use everything we can, trying to keep our carbon footprint to a minimum. We’ve got plans here for large scale solar, which I’m working on now.”

Bone says guests like the quietude Kernow provides. The property has a strict “no kids, no pets” policy so as not to disturb the serenity guests come to Kernow for.

“The unit quality is very important to us,” says Bone. “When you’ve spent vast amounts of money on five-star apartments the last thing you want is pets and kids running around.

“Our pool area is quite close to the units so to have a couple of two-year-olds running around when you’re trying to have a quiet weekend isn’t ideal.”

Family-friendly and wheelchair-accessible accommodation and facilities are planned for later stages of the development.

As for the building’s history as a mental asylum, Bone says it still captures his guest’s imagination.

“A few wings haven’t been touched yet,” he says. “A few guests like to wander through the old wings. It’s quite a big attraction. We’re still not sure whether to make it more of an attraction.”

Kernow’s guests are not the only ones drawn in by the building’s past.

“We’ve had various staff from the property’s days as a mental asylum turn up for a look,” Bone says.

“We’ve also had a couple of former inmates turn up. There were a couple who were moved to other places but kept wandering back in the early days. They weren’t compos mentis but were lovely guys.”

“When we weren’t developing Kernow, it wasn’t a problem. But when we started the building work it became a health and safety issue.

“What happened here is still top-secret stuff, I can’t get a lot of information about it, even photos of when it opened.

“They must be somewhere. Whether they’re sealed records because of what the place was, I don’t know. But I’ve been told the clientele was anywhere from 300 to 600.

“What I’d like people to know is what an interesting place this is to visit. What we’re trying to do here is produce something that’s different, an experience, as opposed to just another Conrad or Shangri-La.” END