Stalking close to home
Thu, 31 May 2012
There is a style of architecture close to my heart. I grew up surrounded by these timber and tin houses. Always raised off the ground for ventilation and often to keep dry in times of flood these homes with their core of four main rooms, a central hallway and surrounded by verandas on most sides filled the landscape of my childhood. "Queenslanders" we call them and today I have found a beautiful example. This home is stylish and true to its roots. It has been modernised but not bastardised. It is simple and simply lovely. This particular home is on the hillside just outside the centre of Brisbane in an area rich with old homes but also under threat from apartment blocks and small lot monstrosities that tower above their neighbours and muscle right up to the boundaries. This is a house of another era but still a house perfect for living in today's subtropics. I would happily move right in.
P.S. It helps that there is a killer collection of indigenous art and artefacts from Australia and Melanesia. Link here while it lasts.
Reader Comments (12)
I love it!!!!
amazing house! love the quirky collection of things in a well restored queenslander!
Oh que oui ! Absolutely gorgeous and exactly what I love in a house. Totally. As is.
Beautiful! Love how they kept it simple and true to the house. The photos make it look like a computer rendering rather than a real place, though.
I think this is my favorite home that I've seen on your website so far. The pictures are incredibly good as well. Beautiful!
I am pretty sure I like everything about this house and how the current owners have it decorated. Beautiful
Love the whole house, and almost everything in it.
The dead animals on the walls - not my taste ;)
Hey Jo! My Aussie beau sent me a website of homes in Brisbane to "shop" through and these "Queenslanders", as you call them have so far been my favorites (with the exception of one very nicely designed contemporary). I especially like the ones with "modernized" kitchens and bathrooms while keeping the original character of the rest of the home. This is a beautiful example. Thanks for posting it! I'm imagining and dreaming... ~Sparky
I agree with Whitney, lovely place... and that the photography is WAY too heavy-handed on the HDR. Very distracting.
Truly beautiful home. Love everything about it, the layout, the casual vibe, the wood floors...I could go on and on. Really lovely. Thanks for sharing this.
I came across this page today. This was our home from late 2007, when we moved up to Brisbane for work, until we sold it in 2012 - it was originally owned by Grant McLennan of the Go Betweens, and he passed away in the top floor of the granny flat in the back yard, the picture of which isn't shown. The photographs were taken by the real estate agent when we put the house up for sale 2012 as we were moving back to Melbourne.
It's slightly disconcerting seeing it on this page and reading people's comments.
I'm pleased about the response to the house and our interior style. Before we left Brisbane, we had renovated the kitchen and en-suite bathroom but because of the previous ownership, wanted to make sure that we kept as much of the original house as possible, including the granny flat. The new owners have now completed the renovations that we started and I'm pleased to say the granny flat has been retained given its significant to Brisbane and Australian music history.
Our taste is a mix of old and new. The Aboriginal art was collected over many years and we bought quite a few new pieces from the Cape York communities. The PNG works were collected on several work trips to Port Moresby. The copper pots and pans in the kitchen were bought over a couple of trips to Paris, and the copper rail was designed by the architect (Phorm Architects in West End, Brisbane) specifically to display the copper collection. We have a number of French furniture pieces including the French couch and armchair, that we bought in Brisbane - we were surprised by the number of antique stores in Brisbane selling affordable French furniture, when we first moved to Brisbane. The armchair is still covered in the original French fabric, although we did re-upholster the French couch. I know it's not to everybody's taste, but I love taxidermied animals and horns. All of the taxidermied pieces were purchased in Melbourne.
Thanks for the all the lovely comments.
Flicking through the images again brings back many fond memories and some not so fond ones. Given the age of the house, the back wall in the back room, that we ambitiously called our library, would literally turn into a waterfall during heavy Queensland storms. The tropical downpours would overwhelm the guttering and water would simply start flowing down the inside of that wall. The number of times, particularly in the middle of the night, that we would be in that room with towels to try and soak up the water, moving artworks and trying to keep our books dry. Luckily the book cases were cheap Ikea cases and were surprisingly hardy, as were the PNG mats on the floor (which we used liberally to hide a cheap chipboard floor that had been put in, at some point in the past, when the room which must've been a back verandah, was enclosed). Fond memories.