Wheels turn for Gippsland’s Tamberrah Cottages and Windmill Pizza Restaurant

A popular East Gippsland tourist attraction featuring a windmill, a wedding chapel and a pizza restaurant has hit the market, three decades after the owners began building the labour of love.

The 2ha Tambo Upper property was a pine tree-covered goat farm with a dam when Jeanne and Rob Fraser bought it almost 32 years ago.

They’ve since turned it into Tamberrah Cottages and Windmill Pizza Restaurant, a quirky holiday destination where guests can eat, sleep, be married and escape the rat race.

The couple has gradually built the property at 6 Bethross Drive — which now has a $1.89 million asking price — from the ground up. They started with a four-bedroom house for themselves and also a home for Mr Fraser’s mother.

The property sprawls over 2ha.

A dam, a windmill with a waterwheel, and a wishing well are part of the package.

“Then we retired and Robbie was bored stiff after six months, so he put (five) cottages on our block as well,” she says.

“Then our guests needed somewhere to eat, so he decided he’d change a garden shed he was building into a pizza shop.”

The couple later added a windmill to aerate the fish-filled dam, a chapel featuring a bell from a church in Oregon, and a wishing well, the proceeds from which go to the Bairnsdale Regional Health Service.

Fraser says it is a family project, with her nearly-90-year-old dad notably helping her husband build a waterwheel attached to the windmill.

Some of the guests who stayed at their cottages have become like family as well, returning as many as six or seven times.

The wedding chapel features a bell imported from an American church.

The property’s cottages have hosted guests from near and far.

They’ve included tourists from as far as England, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, as well as people seeking a “peaceful, quiet weekend away” from their homes in nearby Metung and Lakes Entrance.

She adds while she and her husband loved running their businesses, it is time for them to “really retire”.

Harcourts Bairnsdale director Michael Enever says the listing gives a buyer the chance to “be their own boss and run their own business” by continuing the Frasers’ endeavours, or turning the property into a “health and healing retreat” or something else entirely.