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A farm in recovery - and a landscape coming back to life
When the current owners took over Hillbrook in April 2020, it was the land itself that set the direction. Rugged hill country, ancient pōhutukawa, a waterfall leading to a private beach, and the Tapapararoa Stream running its full length through the property. That stream — starting and ending on the land — conferred kaitiakitanga, stewardship over an entire catchment. But it was the potential beneath the surface that truly captured them. The possibility of what the land could become, and the chance to help a small piece of Aotearoa find its way back to itself.
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Through the pōhutukawa, down to the sea
A 15-minute walk from the main house takes you through ancient pōhutukawa forest and down to a white sand beach on the Pacific. The path is yours alone — no roads, no through traffic, no one passing through. As close to a private beach as New Zealand gets. There's a reliable surf break, good fishing, and if you arrive quietly, the NZ Dotterel — a threatened shorebird that nests here. It's the kind of place that's hard to leave.
Letting the land speak
When the owners took over Hillbrook, the first decisions were about what to stop. No more synthetic sprays. No more artificial fertilisers. No more stock in the waterways. From there, they let the land speak — looking at each area of the property and asking what it was best suited for, what it needed, and what a 50-year vision for this place might look like.
Eleven hectares and counting...
Since 2021, Hillbrook has completed three solid winter plantings across around 11 hectares of marginal grazing land — areas too steep for heavy-footed animals, better suited to native forest.
Alongside the planting, wetlands have been restored, waterways fenced from stock, and a whole-farm predator control programme put in place to give native flora and fauna a fighting chance. The Tapapararoa Stream — which starts and ends on the property — runs cleaner for it. The NZ Dotterel nests undisturbed on the beach. And in the old citrus orchard, a syntropic food forest is taking shape, subtropical and temperate species coexisting in a system designed to produce and restore at the same time.
See the land
coming back
The walking and bike tracks at Hillbrook take you through 11 hectares of restoration in progress. What makes them unusual is the ability to see time itself — the 2021 planting now well overhead and forming a canopy, the 2022 planting thickening behind it, and the 2026 planting just beginning to find its feet. The same land, three different moments in a long recovery.
The tracks wind through native forest, around the wetlands, and out to views over the Pacific. Start close to the house at the orchard, go as far as you like, and let the land tell its own story.
