How to escape the rat race: The couple who swapped city life for a dream existence

Lotte Barnes and Lia-Belle King, both 33, live on a beautiful 22-acre property in the Byron Bay hinterland. Their rented four-bedroom home boasts a wraparound verandah and pool, beautiful old floorboards, high ceilings and plenty of room for friends to stay. The couple spend their days running Bangalow fashion and homewares boutique Worn, caring for their 10-month-old daughter Opi, and picking up fresh produce from one of the many nearby farmers markets.

Of course, living such a dream existence didn’t happen overnight. When the couple first met in Sydney in 2014, Barnes was a creative director in the lifestyle industry and King was working in fashion PR and journalism. Both women had been building their careers for a decade, but within the first six months of their relationship they decided it was time to transform their lives.

“I think part of my motivation to create a lot of change was just because of burnout,” says King. “Really long hours and really high energy all the time. I reached a point of maybe realising that [work] wasn’t the most important thing in the whole world anymore.”

The beautiful entrance to the couple’s Byron Bay hinterland home.

The first step was flying to Bali at the start of 2015 for what was meant to be a holiday.

“We were only actually going to go overseas for three months but within two weeks of being over in Indonesia we decided, ‘This is how we want to be living, and we want to create a new path for our lives’,” says Barnes.

Barnes and King ended up spending two years living in Bali and travelling through India and Sri Lanka on a journey of deep thinking and soul-searching. When they decided to return to Australia and start a family, they realised they didn’t want to live in Sydney anymore. While Sydney appeared to tick all the boxes – it was closer to their families and business contacts, for example, and King was studying a postgraduate psychology degree there – it didn’t support the “slow and organic living” that they had decided was important to them.

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Lia-Belle King sitting in the light-filled living room.

The women pushed aside what society was telling them they should be doing in their 30s (such as buying a house and climbing the corporate ladder) and instead pursued the dreams that resonated more strongly with them. Despite her apprehension about losing her foothold in the property market, Barnes sold her Sydney apartment.

“For us it was just about letting go and surrendering into what was really right for us, and not to get into all the ‘maybe we should do this… or maybe we should be more responsible and do this’. It was more heart than head,” says Barnes.

The couple has been living in their hinterland home for 18 months and haven’t looked back. The only possible downside that comes to mind, they say, is that it would be easier to expand their business if they lived in Sydney – but even this is a blessing in disguise.

“We’ve worked so hard to build a lifestyle that nurtures this quality of life where our decisions are made about ‘how well does this serve us?’,” says King. “We’re not opposed to sometimes closing the shop or not being on email for a day… I think if we were in Sydney we would be more heavily influenced by the pace there.”

The couple achieved a ‘degree of calm’ after surrendering into what was really right for them.

In contrast to city life, the women agree that the best thing about their new lifestyle is the “degree of calm”.

And when it comes to making the decision to drop out of the rat race, Barnes says that fear is often a huge roadblock – but it needn’t be.

“I think that’s the biggest thing: you just have to lean into the unknown and into that fear… For too many people it’s a lovely idea and they want to do it, but it’s such a big thing to do. And I’m not saying it isn’t – it really is a big thing to do. But once you’ve done it, and for us, once we’d done it once, we then realised it’s so achievable and so doable and let’s keep doing this and saying ‘yes’ to all the things that light us up and fuel that fire in us… And so every decision we make now is based around that.”