Since it’s inception in 2012, Hahndorf Creek Day Spa has bestowed clients with their own private healing sanctuary.
Our mission is to create a peaceful, protected space for you to be indulged and cared for so that you may transcend, and much like the butterfly featured in our logo, emerge rejuvenated… whole again.
Traditionally the butterfly symbolises rebirth, renewal, regeneration and new life in many ancient cultures.
Our lives can be likened to the journey of this beautiful creature through the same type of metamorphosis. So like the cocooned chrysalis emerges transformed, here too with us you may nurture the spirit within and emerge a new you.
As well as being socially conscious, we are environmentally responsible and always looking for ways to improve our green footprint. We use harvested rainwater in the wet areas, solar hot water heating and organically grown teas and refreshments.
We feel being a green spa helps us improve our mission to deliver health and wellness to you, so we use only ethically sourced and sustainable ingredients and the purest organic essential oils, clays, herbs, salts, and vegan carrier oils, free from harmful ingredients such as parabens and petrochemicals.
So by protecting our precious environment we are protecting you too.
Since the mid 90’s, Marianne has guided people in their quest for better health after training in a comprehensive variety of allied health modalities including both clinical and complementary medicine, from East to West.
Having spent most of her early adult life in tertiary education, Marianne studied Bachelor of Nutrition and Dietetics, and attained qualifications in Health Science, Naturopathy as well as Food Technology, but it wasn’t until later, that her zeal for herbal medicine and organic skincare came together, when her daughter Ava was born in 2010. Distressed with eczema, Marianne pursued Formulation Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Science to seek solutions to her daughter’s skin issues, and eventually her passion for natural skincare lead her toward finding hills acreage to grow organic botanicals for her formulations.
Having spent much of her childhood in the dispensary of her parent’s pharmacy, one of Marianne’s earliest memories was observing her father patiently hand blending topical creams for their customers.
Absorbed by the vintage apothecary equipment and herbal medicinals, more commonplace in clinical settings than the modern era, she shadowed her father, as he rhythmically blended pestle-ground compounds into base creams, cutting and spreading over a glass slab again and again, with a simple wooden handled spatula, until achieving a perfect consistency
Marianne would scour through the hundreds of herbal monographs in her father’s Pharmacopoeias, soaking up knowledge of by-gone botanicals, and when she thought no one was watching, experiment with his herbal tinctures in vintage apothecary bottles, familiarising herself with their distinctive aromas and textures.
She would quiz him over his lunch break about about all things nutrition, a subject once covered more comprehensively in medical and pharmaceutical schools, their breaks together often becoming more of a nutrition tutorial, than a rest from work for her father!
“There’s nothing flagged here Marianne”, suggested her doctor, handing over a copy of blood work results, despite being bed-ridden for 18 months following a bout of glandular fever in her late teens, “You’re just depressed.”
She then sought natural solutions for her chronic fatigue, eating her way to better health, she experienced the regenerative potential of nature as she promptly transformed from invalided teen to energetic young adult.
With her confidence in nutrition solidified, she pursed her passion at university, and gained a novel position as a naturopathic nutrition consultant in an Adelaide pharmacy as a young adult in the mid 90’s. Warned by those around her the pioneer role, now commonplace in pharmacies, would never succeed, the merging of clinical and non-clinical healthcare felt as familiar to Marianne as returning to the days of Hart’s pharmacy as a child.
In a by-gone era when pharmacists routinely compounded their own custom-made concoctions, tailored to an individual’s particular requirements and often even hand delivered at the day’s end, Marianne brings you the same care and quality with her small-batch, freshly made and thoughtfully formulated natural skincare line. Equally, Marianne and her team maintain the same old-fashioned custom and attention to detail in her Hahndorf Creek Day Spa service, since it’s 2012 inception.
Located less than 2km from the historic township of Hahndorf and only 25km from the centre of Adelaide, Hahndorf Creek Day Spa is situated on 8 beautiful acres overlooking the Onkaparinga River valley and the picturesque Adelaide Hills.
