Lord Howe Island’s new $450-a-night cabin makes the exclusive paradise almost affordable

I’d been dreaming of Lord Howe Island for years — the World Heritage listing, the 400-visitor cap, the wildlife. What stopped me was the price tag. So when I heard about The Cabin, a new self-catering stay on a two-hectare farm that starts at $450 a night in low season, I knew I had to go.

Following a dirt track past two pushbikes, a fire pit and an outdoor shower, I arrive at the sage-green cabin. Inside, the dining table is loaded with produce from the owners’ small farm next door: bananas, papaya, spinach, zucchini, eggs from their chooks, local honey, Lord Howe Roasters coffee, and a peach gin made exclusively for guests. The Cabin runs on solar power and rainwater, and much of it was built from repurposed island materials. Self-catering means you spend less on meals and have more time — and budget — for being outside.

“We wanted to create something sustainable without giving up comfort,” says co-owner Jessie Owens, a sixth-generation islander, as she shows me around the veggie gardens. “A place that reflects how we live here, connected to each other and the land.”

Connecting to the land is what you come here for. In the afternoon, I cycle 20 minutes to town along a road fringed with kentia palms and curious wood hens, whose numbers have surged since a $15 million rat eradication program was completed in 2019. The same constraints that make Lord Howe feel exclusive — limited beds, limited supplies — are also why it feels so alive.

Few understand that better than Ian Hutton, the conservationist I’ve ridden into town to meet. “Lord Howe Island is a microcosm for the world,” Hutton says as we walk along Ned’s Beach, hot-stepping around sooty tern chicks. “It’s just 11 kilometres long, so it’s small enough to make both the problems, and the solutions, to some of the world’s biggest problems, really visible.”

Hutton has spent nearly three decades running volunteer weeding tours, bringing visitors to help restore fragile ecosystems. Limits, he says, aren’t abstract here. They’re practical, enforced, and they work.

These limits are why I don’t see more than five other people sunning themselves on any of the island’s 11 beaches. They’re why, when I head out snorkelling with Marine Adventures, I watch giant green turtles lazing on the coral just a metre away, without them swimming off in fear. They’re also why, after the near-vertical climb up Mount Gower, I can walk through a rare cloud forest that holds around 85 per cent of the island’s endemic plant species.

Later that night, after a celebratory dinner of kingfish chowder at long-standing favourite The Anchorage, I run into Hutton again. He invites me for a post-prandial stroll along Ned’s Beach. It’s a full moon, and hundreds of mutton birds and black-winged petrels lift and circle above the sand, their wings catching the light as they perform elaborate mating dances.

Lord Howe is still exclusive — no doubt about it. But with wildlife rebounding and stays like The Cabin offering a more accessible way in, there’s a sense this is a moment. Not just to visit, but to pay attention to what careful limits can still achieve.