Manutuke Eco Retreat – Gisborne, New Zealand

This beautiful wetland and lakeside eco retreat is located at Manutuke near Gisborne on New Zealand’s East Coast.

The twin-tent glamping site is built with locally sourced eco materials, and carefully designed with sustainability and eco principles in mind. It’s off-the-grid, powered only by the sun, and visually beautiful.

Interconnecting decks and boardwalks immerse guests in the wetland surrounds and connect the different elements of the site. A long jetty out to a viewing platform on the lake is the perfect place to launch the paddle boards or kayak for a relaxing paddle around the lake.

The jetty, with its circular platform extending into the lake, is a striking feature.

Both the jetty and decks use Sand eco-timber decking, a durable, straight grained timber sourced from rapidly renewable local pine forests.

When designing Manutuke Eco Retreat, owner Richie Clark and designers, Pollen Workshop, needed a sustainably sourced timber for the project.

“We used FSC® (Forest Stewardship Council®) sustainably-sourced timber for the project,” says Richie.

“The only wood that ticked all the boxes for us was thermally-modified pine from Abodo. Thermal modification is a new practice that dramatically increases the wood’s durability and stability and leaves it a beautiful rich brown colour which turned out to be a real design feature.

The process effectively creates a new sustainable environmentally-friendly timber which has comparable characteristics to tropical hardwoods. It’s achieved by using steam and high heat to cook the pine up to 230C for 32 hours.