Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 10 i Australian Country Homes

I love our gorgeous country and its infrastructure. From the sprawling historic homesteads to the eco-friendly pods, there’s something about Australian country homes that I cannot resist. Perhaps it’s the people. They often say they’re at the heart of the home, and that’s why each house featured in this issue comes with a story. Because on the outside, these dwellings may look like the product of careful planning and engineering but on the inside, they’re about journeys, family and love. I am honoured to be able to celebrate our Australian country homes with you as editor of this magazine. I can’t wait to share some of my favourite houses with you in this and future editions as we visit not just some gorgeous homes, but some fascinating people as well.…

When the mercury rises, tourists flock to the well-known waterfront suburbs of the Mornington Peninsula to enjoy a relaxed walk along the beach. On the way, they’re bound to pass some of the 600-odd rustic wooden boatsheds that dot the coastal sand dunes. Most of them are nestled among towering trees, decades’-old observers to the changing moods of the vast Port Phillip Bay. These are the views that Sally and Ben Hannemann have enjoyed since childhood and the memories they wanted their three boys — Harvey, Ned and Archie — to make as they grew up. “My parents bought the boatshed next door a long time ago,” Sally says. “So visiting the beach after school, on weekends or during school holidays has always been a way of life for us.…

Kerry Mosey’s future in fashion was sealed from the age of six, when her grandmother taught her to sew. She progressed quickly from making clothes for dolls to garments for herself and other family members and headed straight from school to Adelaide’s Marleston School of Fashion. Kerry started her first label at the age of 19 while she was still at college. “I idolised my father and initially wanted to be a wool classer just like him,” the designer and owner of contemporary country label BullRush explains. “So I guess it was inevitable that I was going to do something textile based. From my very earliest memory, I was interested in fashion and loved looking at fashion magazines. I idolised Maggie Tabberer.” These days, the BullRush label has stores in…

Bubbly chatter and belly laughs greet my arrival at a shiny red front door. It’s ajar so I pop my head into the hallway to a storybook vignette — an artfully arranged succulent, an antique map of Australia hung on vintage wallpaper and a cute cane chair awaiting Goldilocks. It’s tempting to sit down but there’s work to be done. A flash of floral fabric appears and with it a large grin, and it’s quickly apparent I’ve found the true source of the feng shui. With a collector mother and a father who is both an abstract artist and musician, Mia Penn admits to being the product of their creative influence, but with a dash of her own seasoning thrown into the mix. “My mum ran a small business selling…

Hanging on the wall in the entry of the cottage owned by artist Amica Whincop and her husband, Clayton, is the original deed to their property. It’s signed by a gentleman called Henry Devine and dated 1890. Horse-drawn wagons would have lugged the lumber from a local mill to build the worker’s cottage, amid the hustle and bustle of a developing regional centre where scores had come to find their fortunes since Queensland’s biggest gold nugget was found here 22 years earlier. Gympie’s gold rush of the late-19th century came and went, of course, but not before the throngs of treasure hunters and their investment dollars saved the fledgling state of Queensland from bankruptcy. Beloved relics from those pioneering days are preserved throughout the town’s modern-day landscape, steadfast in the…

For Jenny Linn Craggs and her family, a mistake in the address for a house auction newspaper ad caused a happy accident. With 30 days to vacate their former home and nowhere to go with their three little boys, the Craggs found themselves in a dilemma. Fortunately, Jenny’s brother-in-law is a real estate agent and knew the correct time and place of the auction. A couple of doctors from a nearby hospital were the only potential buyers apart from the Craggs to show up. Many years later, the family couldn’t be happier living in the home that is more than a century old. “I almost cried when I walked in,” Jenny says. “Inside there was this horrible nylon, green carpet and it was very dark — so dark I felt…

Driving through the picturesque hinterland village of Maleny in southeast Queensland more than 20 years ago, Betty and Terry Stokes fell in love with a beautiful block of land, which looks out towards the Glasshouse Mountains. “We practically bought it on the spot,” Betty says. “We thought it could be our little piece of paradise.” While work and family commitments kept them in Brisbane for the next few years, in 1998, they finally made the move to Maleny. “Our youngest daughter was getting married and wanted to have the wedding here,” Betty recalls. “So we had a cottage built on the property and moved up to start on the wedding preparations.” By all accounts, the gala wedding was a spectacular affair. Guests arrived in evening wear, the groom and his…

When New Zealand architecture student William Giesen went to Bordeaux University in southern France in 1997, he was following his passion for rugby rather than his career. But the move yielded unexpected results when he teamed up with fellow architecture student Cecile Bonnifait. The couple moved back to New Zealand in 2000 and established the Wellington-based Atelier Workshop, a practice that specialises in sustainable design. Like countless other Kiwis, William’s family had long spent their summer holidays in a “bach” (“crib” in the South Island), a holiday shack on the north coast of the North Island. And as is also common in New Zealand, the Giesens’ bach was on Maori leasehold land. When the lease expired, the family had to demolish the building to return the land to its original…

By her own reckoning, Katie Riddell has been an interior decorator since childhood. She constantly rearranged furniture and has clear recollections of her nine-year-old self disliking the wallpaper in her bedroom so much that she peeled it off. In her real professional life, however, Katie worked as a lawyer for 20 years before finally listening to her inner voice and embarking on an interior design course two nights a week at TAFE college. “It took a while to transition because you need a lot of confidence to make such a radical career change,” she says. “I always worked on the creative side of law, in fashion, retail and property, and I don’t for a minute regret it. It enabled me to become financially secure and it also taught me good…

It was meant to be. When Caroline Gabriel and Shaun Bowden went looking for a property in Melbourne’s near countryside, their wish list included a reasonable train commute to the city, a town with a strong sense of community and culture and a variety of restaurants, theatres and entertainment options. As keen cooks, they wanted a kitchen garden, or at least room to create one, a workable kitchen and space to entertain. Ballarat ticked all the location boxes, so when Caroline spotted an online ad for a mid-19th-century miner’s cottage, she didn’t hesitate to jump in the car and head up to the former gold-rush town to check it out. “Shaun was interstate for work and I was actually searching for another property when I came across the ad,” she…

It’s little wonder Jo and Kyffin Thompson’s friends jokingly refer to their Adelaide Hills home as “the resort”. Visitors to Aramoola arrive to a landscape filled with Australian native plants and a coach-lamp-lined driveway guides them to a quaint, vine-clad English cottage. When Jo and Kyffin started their family, they lived in Stirling, near Aldgate, in the Hills. “It was a beautiful place and we renovated it,” Jo says. “But it was on a sloping block, which was always frustrating.” They navigated their young family across the treacherous entrance steps through the baby and toddler years but after Jo had a bad fall, they decided to move somewhere that was more level. After a long search, the couple found Moola, in Aldgate. “It was the middle of winter, pouring with…

As Heather Cohen tells her story, she went to Tasmania to buy property and ended up with an 1885 cottage in her home town of Glen Innes in the NSW New England region. But then again, Heather has never been one to take the obvious route. “It was a lovely adventure,” she recalls. “I’d been talking about moving for years, but when I got there, I had an overwhelming sense that I’d feel locked on an island. I rang a real estate agent at home and told him I wanted to make an offer on a property I’d seen before I left. But who knows, I might never have realised that if I hadn’t made the trip.” Heather grew up in South Africa as one of three daughters to farmer…

The éclairs are inedible. It’s not that the cream is sour or the pastry has lost its puff, or even that the chocolate has melted, it’s more that the sheer scale and size of these gooey planks of deliciousness makes them impossible to eat while maintaining even an iota of decorum. We’ve only just met and are sitting down to tea with creative royalty, aka Lin van Hek and Joe Dolce, when we discover there’s nothing like slathering yourself in cream and chocolate to break the ice. Ever the gracious hosts Joe and Lin sense our discomfort and scurry back to the kitchen to find spoons and forks and napkins. We settle in for the story of a personal and artistic collaboration that began almost 40 years ago and is…