Burnt out by Hollywood, but with hard-won pitching skills and creative nerve, this couple reinvented themselves — and a patch of hinterland — with a bold wellness venture.
After years trying to make it in Hollywood, when this couple came home to Queensland, they carried a decade’s worth of creative grit and a dash of California woo to shape their latest production, a wellness sanctuary on Tamborine Mountain.
“I haven’t used it once,” Russell Raven says of the saunas, ice baths, hot rocks and salt rooms he and wife Shae Raven spent three years creating in the Gold Coast hinterland.
“We wanted to find a beautiful place, live on the mountain, slow down,” says Shae. “But creating a wellness Zen space for others has been the most stressful thing we’ve ever done. I’m totally burned out again.”
“One of my mentors pushed his phone across the table, and there were a lot of zeros on it. ‘If I just push transfer, I’m your new partner.’”
Russell Raven, Sol Elements co-founder
Shae and Russell had tried their luck in Los Angeles – Russell as an actor/model, Shae a producer/director who also dabbled in a comedy trio under her maiden name, Shae-Lee Shackelford.
“I went over to LA with DC Comics,” says Russell. “I was the ‘little Chris Hemsworth’. I got all the off-cuts that he didn’t want. But LA was rough – if you stop working, you’re irrelevant, so you end up working for nothing just to keep creating content. We got chewed up and spat out.”
But an unexpected by-product of being on that treadmill was that they got exposed to the more transcendent aspects of Californian life, says Shae. “We started to ‘work on ourselves’; getting into healing and realising all of your flaws.”
Combined with skills learnt in storytelling and hard-nosed pitch meetings, they had the toolkit to build something with a dash of élan.
Their creation, SOL Elements, opened in August as part of the newly re-branded Tamborine Mountain Glades precinct in Queensland’s Scenic Rim. Designed as a circular, sound-based spa sanctuary suspended over water, it fuses Hollywood storytelling, Japanese craft, and the rising global obsession with saunas and cold plunges. For the Ravens, it’s the culmination of a decade of creative hustle and self-reinvention.
Solo Man to Mr Tamborine Man
When they were living in Los Angeles, one of the Ravens’ favourite reset buttons was a “sound healing temple” near Joshua Tree National Park. So, when they returned to Australia, they had it in mind to create something like that.
They’d initially thought they’d do it around Noosa, or maybe Byron Bay, but Russell’s mother encouraged them to take a look at Tamborine, a village in the Gold Coast hinterland with walks heading out to rainforests and waterfalls.
In getting to know the mountain, Russell had met Judi and Bob Minnikin, owners of what was then called Cedar Creek Lodges, a tourism operation spanning campsites to high-end lodges; from weddings to tree-top adventures and an earth-moving park.
A circular spa suspended over water
The Minnikins had a patch of land down the bottom of their block, on a pond that would be perfect for a wellness retreat. And they were in the middle of an upmarket re-branding – to Tamborine Mountain Glades.
The new wave of sauna and cold plunge was just forming. Soak Bathhouse, for example, had launched its first venue on the Gold Coast in 2020, but Shae hadn’t seen anything like what she had in mind.
They found a local designer, Design Artisan, willing to push the boundaries. “The builder was like ‘Don’t do a circular building, don’t build on water and don’t use any materials you don’t know.’”
Their naivety led them to do all three, says Shae.
And while it was going to cost a lot more, Russell chipped in with his own innocent bravado. “I said, ‘I’ll raise the money. Don’t worry about that.’ All those things they told us not to do are now the things that everybody goes ‘Wow!’ over.”
What Hollywood taught them about selling a vision
One of the first things Russell did was get a circle of business mentors around him.
“They give me their time because apparently I listen,” says Russell. “You get to fail with them, so you don’t fail in a pitch meeting.
“The funniest was when one company ‘filled the room’. When you pitch or go for a final audition in LA, they’ll ‘fill the room’ with all the execs and producers to make you shit the bed. But because Shae and I had pitched so many shows and done so much work with ruthless TV execs in America, when [the company] filled the room, it was a breeze.”
Learning how to create a pitch deck was one of the most important skills they’d picked up in the US. “People don’t read,” says Russell. “Assume that executives and producers are big children. Give them pretty pictures.”
He figured venture capital wouldn’t be so different. “We were like, ‘Let’s make a Nat Geo book that sells a retreat based on figures alone and make it really pretty.’”
They got their book made up and started pitching. They were swinging for a $20 million, 20-villa resort with a healing spa and restaurant – a full $20 million catastrophe.
“Thank God we didn’t get that one approved. We were not ready.” And Russell let his old world creep back into their lives.
“I kept selling my soul,” he says. His last modelling job in 2023 was for 18 months as the new Solo Man.
Through all this, he managed to get “some high net worths, a couple of public companies and a couple of families” to back them.
And Shae was finding plenty of crossover between film production and marketing a wellness retreat.
It’s all about the assets, she says. “People will share it if it looks awesome. So that’s about having really good videographers and photographers take beautiful shots, and half your work is done.”
Yakisugi, black walls and rejecting beige
One of Sol Elements’ more extraordinary features is its charred black walls. The Ravens had seen the ancient Japanese practice of Yakisugi on television, whereby wood is preserved by burning its external layer. Russell thought he could do that himself, under the guidance of a Japanese master craftsman, Kenji Nishishita.
After he’d burnt the first three attempts to a crisp, giving the watching tradies a good chuckle, Russell thought they were going to need more timber, but he learnt. It took him a month, but he did the internal timbers for the entire building.
“Having the opportunity to spend a week with Kenji San changed my life,” he says. “His appreciation for the small moments slowed me down enough to take a breath amidst the madness of this project.”
And having decided to go with black walls, that informed the rest of their styling, down to the staff’s black robes, and not a speck of beige.
Building over the pond meant they had to empty it twice, during an unseasonally wet year or two, a cyclone and a freak wind storm. But now they have a firepit below water level, giving guests an instant connection to the birds – and turtle – on the pond.
And as the vision took shape, so too did the business case.
Making wellness scalable
“One of my mentors pushed his phone across the table, and there were a lot of zeros on it,” recalls Russell. “‘If I just push transfer, I’m your new partner.’ And I was like, ‘If you’re offering me that now, what will you do when it actually opens?’ So I pushed his phone back.”
They’re already talking about “the next one”. “We’ll keep control of it because, obviously,” says Shae. “We’re perfectionists.”
They say the early numbers have surpassed their business plan projections, prompting “discussions with private equity partners regarding future SOL locations, both within Australia and internationally”.
And all the while they’re proving something to themselves and others. “We’ve been close so many times,” says Shae. “Like, we got very close to selling a travel show in the States. So close … Our families and many people are like, ‘Okay, you guys are doing this. We’ll see.’
“It’s been a long road, but now to have something that is really a reflection of us, giving people a lot of joy and peace, it’s really nice to see that.”
They’ve just got to remember to use it themselves. Russell still fully intends to get in the saunas and ice baths one day soon.
“I’ve had him booked in for a massage twice,” says Shae, “And he’s like, ‘No I can’t, I’m too busy.’”
