The Bellarine’s Lon Retreat Just Revealed What Modern Wellness Hospitality Really Looks Like
Lon Retreat’s new open-air contrast therapy space signals a major shift in wellness-driven luxury travel. Here’s how this Bellarine Peninsula hideaway is setting new standards in design, ritual, and restorative guest experiences.
There’s a quiet revolution happening in travel… and it’s not about bigger suites, more restaurants, or rooftop bars.
It’s about how a place makes your nervous system feel.
Behind windswept sand dunes on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula, Lon Retreat & Spa has opened a new, design-led open-air Contrast Therapy Space. An elemental sequence of heat, cold and rest looking straight out to ocean, lighthouse and pasture. It’s beautiful, yes, but more importantly, it’s a sign of where luxury hospitality is heading.
Because at Lon, wellness isn’t the bolt-on.
It’s the blueprint.
From “Hotel With a Spa” to “Retreat With Rooms”
For years, many hotels treated wellness as an amenity: a gym in the basement, a massage list on a laminated menu. Now, guests are voting with their bookings, and the message is clear, wellbeing is no longer a side dish. It’s the main reason to travel.
Lon Retreat has understood this from the beginning.
Set on a 250-acre farm of pasture and ancient Moonah trees, with just seven individually designed suites and an adults-only policy, Lon opened in 2018 with a simple philosophy: slow down, connect to place, and let nature do a lot of the work. Its mineral pool and hot soak are fed by natural mineral springs flowing through limestone caves deep beneath the property.
The new open-air contrast deck doesn’t reinvent that philosophy. It deepens it.
This is wellness woven into the landscape, not dropped in as an afterthought.
Thermal Ritual, Written in Weather and Light
Lon’s new contrast space reads like a love letter to both bathing culture and coastal weather.
Guests move from the soft, sandstone-lined mineral pool room (where a 26–28°C mineral pool and 38°C hot mineral soak invite long, slow floating) through glass doors and out onto an exposed deck where sauna truly meets scenery.
Out here, the thermal journey is guided as much by the Bellarine’s climate as by the clock:
A Finnish-style sauna for deep, radiant heat and mental softening
A magnesium-rich natural plunge to sharpen the senses
A Swedish soak bucket for that immediate, bracing reset
A communal fire pit to gather, ground and warm back up
Relaxed designer lounges facing out to horizon, dunes, and the occasional grazing cow
It’s contrast therapy, but the Lon way, unhurried, coastal, quietly theatrical. Sky, wind and salt air are as much part of the experience as timber benches and stone.
It’s also a clear glimpse of where wellness travel is going: away from sealed, generic spa boxes and toward element-led spaces that actually reflect where you are in the world.
How Guests Actually Use It
Crucially, Lon hasn’t positioned contrast therapy as a one-off novelty, but as a natural rhythm within a stay.
Hotel guests receive complimentary, extended access to all bathing and contrast therapy spaces from 6am–10pm daily, turning thermal cycling into a pre-breakfast ritual, an afternoon reset after coastal walks, or a starlit bookend to the day.
Day guests visiting Lon Spa can add a 90-minute Contrast Therapy Access Pass to any minimum 60-minute spa treatment, designed to be experienced before a massage, facial or body ritual. Towel, gown, locker hire and herbal tea are included, and several of Lon Spa’s signature rituals incorporate contrast therapy as part of the journey.
Arriving at the treatment table already softened, warmed and grounded changes the experience entirely, muscles yield more, the mind is quieter, and the benefits run deeper.
This is wellness as sequence, not just service. A more mature model for spa design: think in flows, not menus.
What’s equally significant about Lon’s model is that the contrast deck and bathing spaces aren’t positioned as “extras” or optional upgrades… they’re simply part of how you inhabit the property.
Across Australia and globally, the demand for bathing, thermal rituals, and communal wellness spaces is growing far faster than traditional spa services. Guests aren’t just wanting massages; they’re wanting environments that support their nervous system every day, not just for 60 minutes.
Wellness as the New Benchmark of Modern Luxury
Lon might be an independent, family-run retreat on a coastal farm, but it is now operating firmly on the global stage.
From its small corner of the Bellarine Peninsula, Lon has become one of the most decorated spa destinations in the region, named Best Holistic Health Spa at the 2025 Asia-Pacific Spa & Wellness Awards, and runner-up for Best Spa in Australasia after winning that category in 2024. In August 2025, Lon joined the Small Luxury Hotels of the World collection, sitting alongside some of the most considered boutique properties in the world.
Those accolades aren’t about having “a nice spa”. They signal a broader truth: in modern luxury, wellness has become a primary measure of quality, not a bonus line in the brochure.
Judges (and guests) are increasingly asking different questions:
Does this place genuinely change how I feel over the course of a stay?
Is wellness baked into the architecture, the pacing, the land, or is it a menu tacked on at the end?
At Lon, the answer is yes on all fronts. Natural mineral water rising through limestone caves into the pool and hot soak, an open-air contrast deck that feels like an extension of the coastline rather than a theme, and carefully sequenced thermal experiences that prepare the body and mind for deeper treatments. These aren’t decorative extras. They’re the foundation.
The properties rising to the top of luxury lists now are not simply the most ostentatious; they are the ones that treat wellbeing as a core metric of excellence, on equal footing with architecture, service and food. Lon happens to do all of those well, but it is the depth and integrity of its wellness experience that pushes it into award territory.
When Place and Practice Align & Why Lon Feels Different
Plenty of hotels are now adding saunas, cold plunges and spa menus. What makes Lon distinct is that the place itself already feels like a retreat long before a guest steps into a mineral pool.
You arrive through pasture and Moonah woodland, with the ocean somewhere just beyond the dunes. The horizon is wide. The soundscape is mostly wind, birds, distant surf and the occasional cow. It’s the kind of setting that naturally slows your breathing before you’ve even checked in.
The new contrast therapy space doesn’t compete with that atmosphere; it amplifies it.
The Finnish sauna faces out toward open sky and paddocks, so heat is experienced alongside view and shifting light.
The magnesium plunge sits in the open air, where the Bellarine’s coastal quiet becomes part of the reset.
Lounge chairs are oriented not around a bar or a screen, but toward distance and space.
You’re not just moving through a thermal circuit. You’re moving through a landscape.
That alignment between place and practice is exactly where the next wave of wellness-led hospitality is heading. Many properties still start with facilities, then wrap a story around them. Lon has done the opposite: it starts with its land, its silence, its horizon, and asks, “What kind of wellness experience naturally belongs here?”
The result sits in a different category to “hotel with a spa”. It feels more like:
A coastal sanctuary that happens to have seven suites
A wellness environment into which accommodation has been gently folded
In a market where guests are increasingly seeking trips that restore rather than simply entertain, that combination (an inherently calming setting, elevated by serious wellness infrastructure) is exactly what makes Lon stand out. It’s not just scenic, and it’s not just therapeutic. It’s the way the two are layered that lingers.
What Lon Tells Us About the Future of Wellness Travel
Seen in isolation, Lon’s new contrast therapy deck is a beautiful addition to an already beloved retreat.
Seen in context, it’s a signal of where wellness travel is heading.
Across the industry, a few clear patterns are emerging… and Lon happens to sit at the intersection of all of them:
Wellness is no longer a department; it’s a design principle. From springs-fed pools to open-air decks and long access windows, the property is built around how guests will feel in their bodies over the course of days, not just during a single time slot.
Thermal traditions are being localised, not copy-pasted. Lon nods to Nordic sauna, Roman thermae and Japanese onsen, but the experience is rooted unapologetically in coastal Victoria: dunes, salt air, wind, horizon, working farm.
Slow is becoming the new aspirational. There are no “six experiences in 90 minutes” itineraries. The real value lies in repetition: warm, cold, rest, repeat at a pace that respects the nervous system rather than rushing it.
The line between spa guest and hotel guest is disappearing. At Lon, you don’t “visit the spa” as a separate zone. You inhabit a wellness environment that just happens to include seven suites, a farm and a coastline.
For travel and hospitality, the message is blunt: the next generation of guests aren’t just shopping for a bed and a restaurant list. They’re looking for places that help them physically and mentally recalibrate.
On the Bellarine Peninsula, behind those windswept dunes, Lon Retreat & Spa isn’t just following that shift. It’s showing what it looks like when a property is built around it from the ground up.
