My wife and I had a most enjoyable and restful three night stay at Montville to celebrate the New Year 2022.

Montville is a charming village with lots of cottage industries and every day but especially on the weekends it is always full of visitors and tourists who shop hop along its main street tasting great food and buying interesting craft and gift items. It is approximately 100 km north of Brisbane and perched on the Blackall Range in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland.

Our special New Year’s Eve event was a five course degustation dinner at Spicers Clovelly Estate Retreat just outside Montville village. It was a fabulous occasion to bring the New Year in with outstanding food and great wines. However, the accommodation at Spicers was way too expensive for our budget so we chose Clouds at Montville for our three night stay. Clouds is conveniently located just 1.4 kilometres from Spicers and also located on Balmoral Road, which equates to 3 minutes drive or twenty minutes walking along a very good footpath. We chose to walk there and back so we could enjoy a few drinks at the Dinner. It had been raining all day on our way up to Montville from Brisbane but thankfully the heavy rain stopped on our walking adventures.

However, I digress. It is Clouds that I am reviewing here and so let’s get started.

We booked a top floor apartment at Clouds providing sensational views of the mountain scenery from its long verandah. As its name implies we really felt we were up in the clouds staying at this place particularly with the mist from the heavy rain that fell during our visit.. A great feature is a small elevator to get to the top floor, which saved climbing stairs. The apartment has modern décor that is not flash but effective for its purpose. The furnishings were classic Ikea. The living room opens onto the verandah and the room has a kitchenette with a small fridge/freezer and microwave and a full range of cups, plates, wine glasses and cooking utensils. Although the fridge/freezer was a small unit we were very impressed with the amount of freezer space available. The lounge to watch TV was very basic but comfortable. We thought the two small recessed units on either side of the lounge to store phones, wallets, keys, reading glasses etc were an excellent practical feature.

When we arrived at the apartment the complimentary tea and coffee facility was missing. When we reported this, the staff acted immediately and rectified the problem within a few minutes offering us some complimentary Danish pastries for our inconvenience. That really impressed us as we have always maintained that the success of a place is not gauged by how they perform when things go right but more so, how they perform and respond when things go wrong. Top marks to the Clouds staffer on that front.

We had indifferent weather and it rained very heavily on New Year’s Day- all day in fact and so we watched several interesting movies. Clouds provides free of charge for its guests unlimited access to Netflix and You Tube on the Television facility and we thought how good was that. The next day it fined up enough for us to do our own version of shop hopping in the main street of Montville and have a wonderful pizza lunch at the Montville Gourmet Bistro.

Our bedroom was small but the bed was comfortable. There was an open Ikea style wardrobe providing plenty of wardrobe space and an ironing board. There was a good open bench provided to leave our luggage and as well as bath towels, there were towels provided for the swimming pool.

The swimming pool at the back of the complex looked very inviting but the inclement weather meant we missed out on enjoying this pastime.

The bathroom was basic with an efficient shower and a full range of toiletries provided. A nice feature was the warming towel racks to help dry the bath towels.

Clouds provides guests with a complimentary continental buffet breakfast each morning in a most delightful light and breezy French style breakfast room. The breakfast was plentiful and tasty with freshly brewed coffee, a good range of teas, fruit salad, fruit juice, several cereals, Danish pastries, croissants, ham, salami and cheese and a wide range of breads and muffins for toasting.

Hot breakfasts can be ordered at $20 per person extra; however we found the continental buffet more than sufficient.

A great innovation which we took advantage of during two nights of our stay was Clouds very own frozen “Heat at Home” meals – we simply microwaved these at our convenience in our apartment. This is a great service since Clouds only caters for ‘dine in’ for breakfasts and lunches. There are also ready made pizzas for sale ready for the microwave. The staff spoilt us when we purchased our frozen dinners by providing us complimentary chocolate ice creams for dessert afterwards which we appreciated.

Clouds also operates a nearby winery just outside of neighbouring town Maleny and is able of offer their wines to guests for a fee. We chose not to avail ourselves of this service.

One particularly nice feature was the fir tree outside Clouds on the roadside which we noted countless Lorikeets called home as the sun set each evening. Hearing their amazing and familiar squawking chorus was quite awesome.

We thoroughly enjoyed our three night’s stay here. We found Clouds of Montville to be a very nice, modern place to stay for a few nights and offering some pleasing unexpected surprises. Certainly we felt the cost of the accommodation was reasonable for what was on offer and represented very good value for money.