About St Gall

The name of St Gall Writer's Retreat is inspired by a famous drawing. Marcus likes drawings and this is the only western-hemisphere architectural drawing surviving from the 700 year period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the advent of the 13th Century. The Plan of St Gall was created in the 9th Century CE in what is now Switzerland, and depicts an ideal community - the perfect Benedictine Monastery, one that was never built in this form (even though there was an actual thriving Abbey of St Gall, which still stands, and bears no resemblance to the ideal plan).

St Gall at Blackwood is inspired by the desire to create an ideal environment in which to write. The retreat will be characterised by a monastic simplicity and withdrawal from the city (which is only an hour away), and yet not sentimental, nostalgic or cloying in its design.

Despite the historical roots of the name, and the haunted atmosphere of the site’s goldfields and traditional indigenous surroundings, St Gall is going to be modern in all respects. It will be carefully designed to get out of your way, so you, as a visitor, can write.

Like the monastic life, writing is frequently romanticised. Despite this it is mainly just hard work. Some days even lifting the pen seems an insurmountable difficulty. St Gall at Blackwood will provide a calm, nurturing and not-at-all luxurious framework for the occupant’s writing efforts. It will be a place where you can concentrate and just get on with it, free from distraction. No television, no wifi.

Just a modest cabin amongst the trees.

Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, an unfortunately misogynistic but indisputably influential giant of 20th Century architecture, famously described his houses as a machine for living in.

St Gall at Blackwood will be designed to be a machine for writing in.