Patricia Gill, Denmark Bulletin
Fifteen short-stay ‘tiny house cabins’, or holiday chalets, have been given the green light for Raintree Estate on South Coast Highway.
The caravan-size chalets, which can be moved, will be placed on five locations on the farm and the development includes a manager’s residence south of The Dam restaurant also on Raintree Farm.
The chalets will be accessed from South Coast Highway, Richardson Road, Wentworth Road and Privett Road and have an expected life cycle of 10 years.
Accommodation provider company Heyscape which partners with RACWA, is providing the chalets as off-grid nature escapes similar to camping where visitors can stay in picturesque premium locations in WA.
Heyscape manages similar holiday accommodation at Busselton, Avon Valley, Chittering, Serpentine, Denmark, Esperance and Yallingup.
The cabins have a usable floor space of about 17sqm, plus an outdoor deck living area.
Three of the cabins already installed as a six-month trial are one bed-room units, three are two-bedroom, another eight are one-bedroom and four are family units.
A caretaker’s dwelling accessed via Wentworth Road has an internal usable floor area of 24sqm plus an outdoor deck.
All dwellings have a bathroom, living area, kitchen and bedroom, and include a bathroom vanity, indoor shower, outdoor bath, kitchen sink and flushable toilet.
The Shire of Denmark’s Local Planning Strategy 2024 sought to clarify the appropriate scale of tourism land uses in the Rural zone.
That document shows that rural tourism should be supported as a secondary, incidental land use only while preserving agricultural production and conservation as the primary uses of land in the shire’s rural areas.
In his report to the June 24 Denmark Shire Council meeting, development services manager Craig Pursey writes that the application responds to this consideration and the protection of visual landscape values.
The application seeks to locate chalets adjacent to areas of remnant vegetation but outside of cleared areas used for grazing and other farming practices.
This article appeared in Denmark Bulletin, 10 July 2025.
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