The business of place: networks of property, partnership and produce

The paper examines one of Australia's most successful luxury hospitality businesses, Peppers Hotel Trust. It focuses on the Trust's flagship property The Convent at Peppertree a hotel, restaurant and winery complex located in the heart of Pokolbin in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, Australia's most visited wine-tourism district. Against the familiar economic accounts which frame Peppertree as a valuable piece of real estate and the product of an unerring entrepreneurial vision, it is recast here as a more precarious network in which the complex threads from which it is woven are simultaneously social and material; configured by the intimate social relations of marriage, friendship and business partnerships and the material fabric of buildings and gardens, wines and foodstuffs through which these relations take and hold their shape. We trace three pathways through the Peppertree network the social relations of the business 'partnership', the 'Convent' building which anchors the business in place; and the 'gastronomic landscape' from which the restaurant at Peppertree sources local produce. These pathways open up some of the multifarious ways in which knowledge and agency are distributed through the network and enable us to admit new possibilities for financial story-telling; the spatial complications of production and consumption and the situatedness of our own research practice and account. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.