History

Wyadup Brook Cottages was established in December 1996 but the story starts long before that. This family run business has been an in-house project from inception to completion and it all began with Tom and Doris Ritter.

The 250 acre farm that is home to Wyadup Brook Cottages was purchased in 1955 by Helmut Ritter. Helmut had travelled to Perth Western Australia from Germany to work as a carpenter in 1954 leaving his fiance ,Doris Benz, in Germany with the promise that he would return to marry her and they would make their new home in Australia.

Helmut was soon  changed to Tom as Australians found his first name difficult to pronounce correctly. He has been known as Tom Ritter ever since. So, Tom worked in Perth for a short time and then teamed up with another carpenter and worked in the wheatbelt region constructing State Housing Homes,saving all his hard earnt cash in readiness to buy a farm. By the end of 1955 he had purchased the property in Yallingup and then returned to Germany. Tom and Doris were married in September 1956 and the honeymoon was the return trip to Perth. Work was still hard to get in the city so they moved south to Shannon River, near Manjimup. They needed to save some money before starting their life together on the farm in Yallingup.Their first child, Angela, was born at the Pemberton District Hospital in June 1958. They then spent a short time in Busselton before permanently moving to the Yallingup property in 1958.

Some of the land had been farmed before but most of the 250 acres was still bush. Tom and Doris cleared and pastured the property by hand in order to feed a dairy herd. The cream was sold for butter production and the cream cans picked up at Caves Road and taken to the butter factory in Busselton.( Caves Road was a gravel road then and Wyadup Road was only a dirt track.) During this time Tom also worked in Houses Timber Mill. In 1961 Tom and Doris welcomed their second daughter, Judith. By 1965, daughter number three, Monica arrived and soon after in 1966 daughter number four, Virginia completed the Ritter clan. By the early 1970's milk quotas had been introduced and farming needed to be more productive to be financially viable. Tom decided to go back to his trade as a Builder and the cows were kept for beef production.

In the mean time the daughters blossomed into attractive young ladies, completed high school at Busselton and continued tertiary studies in Perth. Judith decided to tackle Architecture and chose to do a "real" project, Wyadup Brook Cottages, for her thesis. The thesis was completed in 1989 but that was of course the easy part. Once the reality of finance was assessed again, the designs were re-done and by December 1996 we had 4 cottages open for business. Our fifth cottage was completed in March 2001.

Judith and Mark manage the day to day mechanics of the business and Tom and Doris help with maintainence and cleaning. It is still all in-house with Tom and Mark  attending to any new items of furniture as they are needed.

We hope that you will enjoy being part of this story too.