The hotel
About Red Timbers
Built in 1937 for a timber yard, a hotel since 2011, and still the same building underneath: the rimu framing, the stair, and the rafters in the west end suites.
The building
The yard above Cashmere milled and dressed timber for the city from the 1890s. This building went up in 1937 as its office, weighbridge room and quarters for the crews who worked the plantations on the hill. It was built out of what the yard had, which is why a two-storey office has framing heavy enough for a warehouse.
The yard closed in 1974. For thirty years the building was a school camp, then offices, then empty. The rimu framing, the stair and the roof structure are original. The floors, the services, the lift, the roof itself and every window are not — all of that came out between 2009 and 2011, and again in the strengthening work of 2013.
It opened as a hotel with 34 rooms in 2011. The north wing added 24 more in 2016, which is the part of the building that looks like what it is: new, straightforward, and quieter than the old part.
The hotel today
| Rooms | 58 across five categories, on three floors, with a lift to all of them. |
|---|---|
| Staff | Forty-one people, twenty-eight of them full time. The head chef has been here since 2014 and the maintenance manager since the building was a building site. |
| Owner | Red Timbers Hospitality Ltd, NZBN 9429046172584. A New Zealand company with four shareholders, three of whom live within ten kilometres of this address. |
| Rating | Qualmark 4 Star Plus, reassessed most recently in 2025. |
| Guests | 128,400 since 2011. About 38% of them come back, which is the number we watch instead of the review score. |
| Licences | An on-licence for the restaurant and bar, and a class 4 gaming venue licence for The Rimu Room under the Gambling Act 2003. |
How the place is run
The front desk is staffed at every hour of the day and night by a person who is awake and can make a decision. Housekeeping starts at seven and stops at three, so nobody is vacuuming a corridor at nine in the evening. The kitchen runs one menu across the restaurant, the bar and room service, which is why the food arrives at the same standard wherever you eat it.
Water is heated by a heat pump plant put in when the north wing was built, and the roof carries 96 solar panels that cover most of the daytime load between October and March. The kitchen composts through a Canterbury operator and the bar has taken glass out of the general waste since 2018. None of this is remarkable and we are not going to pretend it is; it is what a building this size ought to do.
The name
Rimu, sawn and left in the sun, goes a deep red-brown. The yard sold it as red timber and the crews called the office the same thing, and the name was still painted on the gable when the building was bought. It was cheaper to keep it than to invent something.
The rooms and the public rooms are named the same way — after timbers, after the tracks on the hill behind us, and after the valley the pools look into. Nothing here is named after a person, which was a deliberate decision and has saved a number of arguments.