Professionals Tamborine Mountain 
Tamborine Mountain is renowned for its friendly community, its beautiful nature and its breathtaking views. It should be obvious, then, that the wedding industry is booming, and there’s no better example of that than Wynmère Estate. A dream in the making for Stephanie & Gareth Jones since 2016, Wynmère opened its gates only six months ago at time of writing, and already Stephanie & Gareth have quite a few fascinating stories to tell.
by Kyle Hitchmough
What was your inspiration to open this location?
Stephanie: We lived in Europe for 10 years and we fell in love with the architecture and the gardens over there so when we came home, we always knew we wanted a little touch of Europe, thus the formal French gardens and the very traditional English Georgian architecture. It’s such a gorgeous location so weddings just made sense. The mountain is a bit of a wedding hub!
Are you primarily a wedding venue or do you host any other functions?
Stephanie: We do some corporate, some product launches and some small luxury events, car events, etcetera but weddings are our main trade.
What facilities do you have here?
Stephanie: We have the open garden space, a beautiful creekside location, which is nice and cool for the summer months. Then we have all of the rest of the garden space if they want a purely outdoor ceremony. We’ve also got the atrium, which is a covered ceremony area, transitioning to the Georgian styled reception space for the evening portion.
Do you work with any other businesses in the mountain’s wedding industry?
Stephanie: Yes, particularly the accommodation. We’re on the doorstep of some of the bigger options like Edges Lodges directly opposite, The Escarpment, and the Hotel Motel and also the Verandah House Country Estate. They do our more luxury bridal accommodation, which is lovely.
Do you offer any particular packages? What goes into booking your wedding here?
Stephanie: We’re a more luxury product, so we’d always encourage a site tour so people can meet us and see the property. We do a limited number every year. We like to keep it boutique. Whether it’s an elopement package or the full reception package, we have an in-house catering team who are incredible. We hand-chose them. One of their restaurants has been Hatted twice, The Little Truffle, a little French restaurant down on the Gold Coast.
Gareth: You certainly get the silver service here at our venue!
What goes into the average day here for you?
Gareth: Landscaping is a big one. It’s a visual impact statement here, and we like to make sure that everything is presented beautifully every time.
Stephanie: Generally it’s an eight hour package, so they’d have their ceremony in the afternoon followed by canapes and drinks and then the reception. Everything takes place in-house.
Have you noticed any particular trends in your clientele?
Stephanie: It’s very mixed. We always find it quite surprising the different people that we have. We just had a couple book from Dubai last week.
Gareth: Because we’re a European-style venue, generally people who are looking for a European influence come to us.
Stephanie: They want to do a wedding in Italy but can’t take 90 of their family and friends there. This is the Australian option.
As locals, what are your opinions on the Tamborine Mountain area and community?
Stephanie: It’s wonderful! We’ve finally found our little tribe of friends, so it’s fantastic. It’s nice to see the Scenic Rim start to grow.
Gareth: Since it’s a tourist area, we’ve certainly found a lot of very like-minded people. We’ve made a lot of friendships and partnerships. It’s been quite an interesting ride!
What’s your favourite thing to do on the mountain?
Stephanie: Main St. Provedore is fantastic. We really love the Coffee Plantation as well. If you’re going further afield, we sometimes go out to Kooroomba Lavender Farm for the beautiful food.
Gareth: The Boonah way is fantastic. There’s some great places around the entire local area, we really enjoy it. There’s plenty of things to do here, and a lot of diversity which is great. We do try and get around as much as we can.
Were you particularly affected by the recent extreme weather in the area?
Stephanie: The tornado obviously created lots of debris, but we were more affected by the flood.
Gareth: There was still weeks of cleanup and getting it back to how it was but nothing like what some people have suffered. We put a huge generator in about six months ago just as a backup, so luckily we could still keep everything running. We opened up our cool room to as many people as we could, so people were dropping off their Christmas hams and things, and we opened our venue space so people could charge their devices. We had the ice maker running as well.
Stephanie: We ran the electrical cords to our neighbours who run an AirBnB so we could keep them going. We had everyone powered up. Some older folks from up the road were coming for showers and the like.
What do you think Wynmère Estate really provides to the area?
Stephanie: Lots of industries up here benefit, we’ve got some fantastic vintage car companies up here that do transport. People stay overnight, they go to the restaurants and the stores and visit the wineries, etcetera. We also have quite a few international weddings, with people flying from China and Japan and also nationally from Sydney and Melbourne, so it brings a whole lot more people to the area, which is great. We do have recommended suppliers for flowers too, local growers and florists that we work with, same with photographers, videographers, celebrants… the industry is huge.
Gareth: We’ve heard firsthand from a lot of the businesses up here that the trade has improved just from our influence.
What do you enjoy most about doing this?
Stephanie: I love gardening! It’s very rewarding seeing the property grow. It was a visual thing we’ve thought about for 20 years together, so finally it’s coming to fruition.
Gareth: And we like to be able to share that with our guests. We love that other people like our aesthetic as well!
Stephanie: And to meet people from different walks of life.
What’s been your most memorable moment in your time here so far?
Stephanie: We were on Married At First Sight! That was an interesting experience.
Gareth: You have no idea what goes into a television production until you see it firsthand. The whole crew came up from Sydney for that and they all stayed up here as well.
Stephanie: We can’t say too much about it because of NDA clauses, but the fan-favourite so far and the oldest couple they’ve had on the series, Richard and Andrea, were married right here.
Is there anything else you’d like to go on the record?
Stephanie: It’s our intention to be as low-impact on the environment as possible.
Gareth: We’d like to reestablish a lot of the rainforest around here too. Slowly and surely, we’re getting in and replanting the natives, trying to do our bit.
Wynmère Estate
108-118 ALPINE TERRACE, TAMBORINE MOUNTAIN QLD 4272
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