Meet the team
“The shed, the tables and the people”
Karri Lodge began with a cabinetmaker, an empty packing shed and a stack of offcuts. This page tells the story and introduces the people who run the house now.
The founder's account
“Who stands behind a house?”
The venue is operated by WAFFLE ADVERTISING LTD, 85 Great Portland Street, London W1W 7LT, United Kingdom. Guests have a right to know who stands behind a house before they walk into it, so I say so first. Everything else about Karri Lodge, from the pastry to the oil on the tables, is the work of the people named on this page.
My name is Lachlan Griffiths, and I was born in Manjimup. My grandfather cut karri at a mill in the forest, and my father repaired the trucks that carried it. I was the one who preferred the workshop, and at seventeen I was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker who taught me that a joint should be strong enough to be forgotten.
For twenty years I made furniture and shopfittings for other people. I enjoyed it, but I kept thinking about the town's evenings. Manjimup has good food and good company and very little of either after dark. I wanted a place where a family could have a proper dinner and a quiet game of cards among friends, and I wanted to build it.
The packing shed on Mottram Street came up for sale in a dry summer. It had graded apples for half a century, and the roof was sound, the light was good and the floor was flat. I bought it with my savings and a loan from my brother, and spent a year making it fit to receive guests.
The first thing I built was the tables. I cut jarrah and marri offcuts from my old workshop, planed them by hand and fitted the legs with pegged joints. The kitchen came later, and so did the chairs. The lodge opened on a wet Wednesday with seven guests, one pie and a lamp that would not stay lit.
The lamp stayed lit the following week, and it has been lit on every open evening since. If you drive in on a dark night from the Pemberton road, it is the first thing you see.
The people
“Four faces you will meet first”
Renee Wells
Host
Renee Wells grew up near Pemberton and spent five years in the tasting room of a truffle farm before joining the lodge. She takes the bookings, welcomes every guest at the green door, and has a memory for names that startles regulars. She also keeps the bird list on the verandah wall.
Glenn Russo
Floor manager
Glenn Russo comes from a family of market gardeners and managed a farm-stay before turning to the lodge. He runs the rota, the dining room and the order of the evening, and has a gift for noticing a guest who needs something before they know it. He is quietly strict about starting on time.
Gareth Clarke
Head chef
Gareth Clarke trained in country kitchens across the south-west and cooks the way he was taught: properly, patiently and with local produce. He knows every grower within an hour's drive by first name, and he is the only person I have met who writes pastry notes in the margins of a novel.
Megan Atkinson
Croupier
Megan Atkinson trained at a dealers' school and has dealt roulette, blackjack and poker for eleven years. She leads the casino room, trains each new dealer and has a talent for explaining a difficult rule to a nervous beginner in a single plain sentence. Her tables are the quietest in town.
Looking back
“How the shed became a lodge”
The first winter
Winter in the Southern Forests is cold and wet, and the shed was draughty. Glenn Russo, who had just joined, spent his first fortnight stuffing gaps with wool. We lit a wood stove, hung a curtain across the casino room and served soup and pies to anyone who came. By the end of that winter we were turning guests away on Saturdays.
The second room
The casino room was the last part to be finished. I wanted it to feel separate from the dining room without feeling shut away, so I built a pair of tall doors that open in the evening and close at ten. The tables stand in a row down the middle, and the lamps hang low enough to hush the room.
What has stayed the same
We still start the evening with the kitchen, and the tables still open at half past five. We still check identification at the green door, and the chips are still counters with no money value. I have no plan to change any of it, and I hope the next generation of staff will be equally stubborn.
About the house
“Is it really a packing shed?”
- Is the building really a former packing shed?
- It is. The long roof, the wide doors and the concrete floor are all original. The floor was levelled and covered with jarrah boards in the dining room, but the roof beams are exactly as the packers left them.
- Did Lachlan Griffiths build everything himself?
- Not everything. He made the five tables, the doors between the rooms and the host's desk. The kitchen was fitted by a local firm, and the chairs were made by a friend from a workshop at the edge of town.
- Who looks after the lodge when the founder is away?
- Glenn Russo, the floor manager, runs the house in full. Lachlan is present most evenings but not all of them, and the lodge is run in the same way whether he is at the green door or at home.
- How long has the lodge been open?
- Long enough for the first guests to have become regulars and for some of their children to have become guests. The lamp over the door has been lit on every open evening since the first Wednesday.