From The Farm to the Beach

Yesterday at the crack of dawn I headed out to the newly renovated beach cottage trio to oversee the final stage, the fixing up of two more bedrooms.

I have to say, the drive from the farmhouse to the beach, which takes about half an hour or so, is quite lovely. Yesterday as I drove down my driveway the sun was coming up and the second day of winter put on a spectacular display of low-lying clouds which looked like glaciers dripping down the mountains.

The trip takes me across an old iron bridge over a wide blue river, though the edges of "fibrotown" and down winding country lanes that mark the borders of the emerald green paddocks of dairy farms. It occurred to me that early morning building inspections were really not all that bad as the dairy coast was looking particularly crisp in the early morning light after a week of torrential rain.

In the third stage of the drive the landscape turns into bush where you have to be on the look out for darting kangaroos and doddling echidnas and wombats before the bush thins out into salty coastal scrub and wetlands then finally sand dunes.

Anyway, I share this as it is all part of my daily experience and I must say it takes the stress out of the renovating day.

Back to the cottage. So here are some pics of the as yet slightly unfinished interiors of the biggest cottage where I found myself going instinctively with a taupe and white palette with a few injections of bright colour, without really thinking too much about it.

My favourite architectural detail is the cantered ceiling, quite a folly for such a humble, early 20th century beach cabin. To finish off the decorating, I have some old surfboards and some retro hawaiian fabric which will inject some much needed spot colour and add a bit of casual beach funk to the rooms which were starting to look a bit polite for their context.

The few pieces of vintage furniture like the grey dressing table and the aqua painted seagrass table also add a bit of quirky retro charm.

I'll post the new bedrooms in a week or so, if and when they finally come together!

Seafarers Cottages: All In The Details

Now that the Seafarers Cottages renovation is almost at the finish line, I thought I'd share a little about the story behind the project, some before and after pics as well as some of the tricks of the trade.

History of the cottages:

These three cottages, built in the 1930s are the original "beach shacks" in what was a fishing camp that became a village on a remote peninsula jutting out into the Pacific Ocean, about 2.5 hours drive from Sydney. Very little had been done on their upkeep over the past 20-30 years and they were in a pretty shabby state.

Why did we buy the cottages?

Though they were identified as heritage items, they like many other gems in this part of the world, remain unprotected. We are quite passionate about preserving some of the beach shack heritage here and love the challenge of turning them into stylish beach getaways for people wanting a break from their busy city lives.

The village of Currarong is just about our favourite place. It remains a rare time capsule of beach village chic and is in a stunning, unspoilt area surrounded by nothing but rugged coastline, deserted beaches and national parks. So we went out on a limb to buy them so they wouldn't be demolished to make way for a quite probably ugly, unsympathetic juggernaut.

What did we do to update the cottages?

Almost nothing was done to the actual footprint of the cottages. Most of the work involved replacing bad improvements and upgrading the kitchens and bathrooms. There were cheap aluminium windows installed in the seventies which we replaced with reclaimed timber windows as close as possible to what would have been there originally.

One of the biggest changes was putting in a new picket fence to replace the old "hurricane" fence which was bent and twisted in parts. We put back lots of the architectural detail like architraves around the windows, fibro cover strips and picture rails.

We kept the old fireplace hearths. One now houses a TV, the other two now have kitchen cupboards in them. We turned the old shed that housed the generator into the laundry.

Reinstating and reinventing the period features gave the cottages back their soul and charm. It also makes a great backdrop in which to decorate!

Bye the way - please leave a comment as I love to hear what you bloggers out there think!