What would you do if Tesla gave you a car for the weekend? Road trip, of course! Today we’re taking you on a road trip to Daylesford to experience Clifftop at Hepburn, designer accommodation in Daylesford, Victoria with a bevy of design and accommodation awards under its belt including being recognised as Australia’s No.1 Romantic Getaway! However it’s Clifftop’s latest achievement that we came to see, having newly installed Tesla Powerwall‘s, Clifftop at Hepburn have managed to turn their indulgent luxurious villa’s into fully sustainable eco homes. So to test out this Tesla Ecosystem and get a feel for the future, we jumped in our EV (that stands for electric vehicle guys, get used to hearing it) and headed North… luckily for you, we saved you a spot.
We visited the Evoke Villa at Clifftop at Hepburn recently equipped with a Tesla Powerwall, making this villa a self-powered home by combining solar energy and the Powerwall to independently power the home day and night. During the day, if the solar panels produce more energy than the home uses, the Powerwall stores that excess solar energy and makes it available on demand, even after the sun has set. This we found out is especially handy in Daylesford, as the area is prone to power outages – so now when the grid goes down, solar energy continues to power the villa. It’s also fitted with an iPad that allows you to access the Tesla app, so when staying there you have full visibility into your self-powered home – including how much power you’re using! This was really fascinating as it gives you a really great indication into how much power you consume on a daily basis. We spoke with Dave, the owner of Clifftop at Hepburn about his decision to ‘become a greenie’ and why he chose to install the Tesla Powerwall. Watch the video to hear what he had to say.
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AI Generated·May contain errors
What would you do if Tesla gave you a car for the weekend? Road trip.
Hey, I'm gonna put on some sweet beats. Put on some sweet beats.
Already have, get in the car, let's go. Okay, let's go.
How's the gliding out of here? Floating on a cloud, let's do this.
Getting a Tesla, it is very luxurious. I love how simple the design is.
Where are we off to? Well, we're going to Dale's first.
We're going to check out Clifftop and Hepburn, which has won a bunch of like awards,
accommodation awards, as well as some interior design awards.
And apparently it's meant to be like the most romantic place to stay.
And the good thing is they've just had all these solar panels installed,
like a whole Tesla ecosystem. So we can park this guy, charge it up,
which is going to be good because if we don't charge it, I don't think we should get home.
We've got it charged up, we're at 29%, which will get us to dinner.
Let's go inside and have a look at our eco villa. We are staying at a Vogue,
and there is the Tesla power wall. So that is powering this entire villa.
Okay.
Seriously, how good is this? That's just the most phenomenal view.
And I wasn't expecting that when we were driving here. It doesn't look like
you're going to see that phenomenal view and that sheer drop.
So this is, they've got an iPad up here, so you can obviously do whatever you want.
You can play your music, but you can also check out your app. So look at that. I mean,
the sun is not out. It's actually raining, but you can see that it's still creating energy from
the sun, the solar coming in and it's feeding in. And I think that's how much we're giving to
the grid. Still pretty good. How beautiful are these materials? Look at this bit of steel.
Isn't that insane? That bit of bent steel. It's so raw. And the timber here is phenomenal.
Bench seat. Hello. Oh my God. This is like screaming for a glass of red wine. I love it.
Look at these chairs. There's a lot of reclaimed materials in here, reclaimed timber. And it's just,
I don't know, everything's just been sort of handpicked. It's just beautiful.
Fireplace is giving out a lot of heat. And I mean, a lot of heat is so warm in here.
The kitchen is amazing. And I love this. We've got all our brekkie goodies. So we've got some
bircher. I think there's a beautiful loaf of bread there. All local produce,
coffees and teas. Plus this is very special. Look what they've given us. Oh my God. These
are all locals as well. Hungry? Yeah, I'm starving. Do you want something? Do you want nuts?
All right. There you go. Some nuts. How beautiful is the kitchen? I really like that
LED strip lighting. It just picks up all that beautiful steel. What is this? This is like,
it looks like a piece of... It's an I-beam. It's a what beam? An I-beam. An I-beam. It's like
structural all the way through. It is structural. It's beautiful. That works really nicely with the
It's very raw and industrial, but it's really cozy.
Come on.
But that's nothing. Okay. You've got to come and see the bathroom.
Bath is so big. And speaking of big, look at the size of this. I've never seen a showerhead like
it. That is insane. And then these tiles are really interesting. It's almost like wallpaper.
Pendant. And again, it's just like so industrial. It's got that beautiful copper.
It's really interesting the way that they've put their pendants there with a mirror. It actually
works really well. So this is actually kid-friendly and not only is it kid-friendly,
but it's really kid-friendly. Look at this.
Okay. Here we go. We're going to bring her up. There we go. Look at that. Check out the music
on it. I got my sword. You got my sword? We're up. So come on through. This is the master bedroom.
We've got these. We'll bring this up.
That is not normal. That is beautiful.
Absolute heaven. I don't even know how to compute the scale of this bathroom. The scale of that
bath is insane. It's just so moody. Can you hear the echo, which is just...
And then there's double showerheads over here. Can you get that?
This is very luxe. It's got that decorative kind of wallpaper look to the tile. There's so much
kind of quirk. There's a lot of quirk to these interiors, but it works really well. I guess we
could be doing some work, but I feel like we're not going to be doing some work. I feel like a
romantic pad. Oh my gosh. Which level? Pop?
There you go. Cheers.
There's interesting little glasses. And what I noticed is that literally every room I go into,
I feel like I'm stroking all of the surfaces. It's just so tactile in here, and I really like that.
And I like the fact that the architect was very heavily involved in what materials went
into this space. And I know you can just tell. You just keep looking at things,
and there's just so many things to touch and feel and experience. And I think it makes it
okay to spend all your time inside because you feel like you're part of it. You feel like you've
got all of the experience. Although I probably could have just stayed a little bit. Very cozy
indeed with that fire going. That it was. What do you think about the villa?
I like to spend most of the afternoon touching all the surfaces.
How far is the Captain Tesla saying? Captain Tesla says 10 minutes.
How pretty is this? You can see why people get married here.
Do you want to renew our vows? We just did it.
Toppet Headburns is a family business, and we own three of these two-bedroom, two-bathroom villas,
four of the Newtona hotel rooms. Tell me about Tesla and what motivated you to put the ecosystem
in. Well, we try to be as eco-friendly as possible. I would never have considered myself a greenie.
There's little doubt that we're killing the planet. We try to save water. We try and reuse a
lot of things, refurbish, repurpose the whole lot. To me, it made sense to partner with someone
like Tesla. They make it pretty easy to be a greenie though, to be fair. It's very cool.
Where else can you buy eco-friendly stuff that looks really sexy and does the job that it's
meant to do? Exactly. We've just plugged in, which is good because we've done some honing around.
We ran that battery down. The crazy thing about the system, look at the weather,
we're actually generating two kilowatts of power right now. Even when it's raining,
we generate power through the solar. It's nuts. That's the power wall? Yep. The solar system's
on the roof that feeds power to the power wall. Then you charge from the charger. The idea of the
Tesla app is that it allows you to track and control what power, see what's happening in
your villa so you can learn about it. All three of our villas are on here. You'll be able to see
them. At the moment, you're in a vote. When we got it this morning, it was probably about 20%
because it gets used overnight. Despite the fact that it rained most of the day and it was overcast,
it's now charged almost. It feeds a lot of power in the grid. Even if you drain the battery,
we've fed so much power in the grid, we draw it back. It's a net arrangement so we don't pay for
what we draw back. The real benefit of something like this is you can tell what's happening where.
For example, you're charging now, so it's using quite a lot of power. 1.6 kilowatts is coming
from solar, but this on a warm, on a hot day, anything from when it's not cloudy,
will be generating five kilowatts, which will charge the battery, charge most of the vehicle
and run most of the villa for the whole day. You're going to have to say sorry, we can't chat.
Don't answer the phone. Sorry, Dad. We've got dining to do.