Travel Guides' Kevin and Janetta selling their 100-year old home in Maldon, Victoria

• Owners: Janetta Stones and Kevin Moloney
• Address: 21 Boundary Road, Maldon, Victoria
• Type of property: A renovated 100-year-old cottage with a Tuscan-inspired garden
• Price guide: $1.45 million-$1.55 million

For the past eight years, Janetta Stones and Kevin Moloney have travelled the world as critics on Channel Nine’s Travel Guides.

Between trips to places like Tokyo, Argentina, India and Morocco, they’ve returned to their 100-year-old home in the small gold rush-era town of Maldon in Central Victoria.

Declared a Notable Town by the National Trust in 1966, Maldon is a tourist destination known for its well-preserved 19th-century buildings, historic railway station and relics from its gold mining past.

“From the front of the house, we look at old gold diggings – a lot of the history of Maldon is right outside the front door,” Stones says. 

“There’s always something going on in town. From closing the street off to have a twilight dinner for 1000 people to folk festivals, every second weekend there’s something on.”

Originally from Melbourne, the couple moved to their former weekender in Maldon after retiring in 2012 and bought their current home – a five-minute walk from the centre of town and flanked on three sides by bush and crown land – in 2018.

While it “required a lot of love”, the two jumped on the opportunity to reinvigorate the old property, drawn to its views of Mount Tarrengower and the chance to turn a self-contained one-bedroom cottage into the perfect guest house.

“I suppose you could call it a renovator’s delight,” Moloney says. “We’d often drive past it and it’d been on the market for quite some time, but I could really see the potential in it.”

Living between the cottage and the main house, they embarked on a year-long renovation, raising ceilings, removing internal walls, ripping out old carpet and building a wrap-around verandah.

While the revamp was extensive, they were careful to retain the home’s historic features, including its quaint weatherboard facade, wood-panelled ceilings, and bevelled glass French doors and windows.

“The last place we had was sort of lodge-like and I wanted to go with what I call the ‘Edelweiss theory’ here – small and white, clean and bright,” Moloney says, referencing lyrics from The Sound of Music. “We wanted it to be light and airy with clean lines.”

Channelling his passion for gardening, Moloney took on the challenge of transforming the outside, taking inspiration from their travels to create a Mediterranean-style space complete with olive trees, a grapevine-covered pergola and a lush walled lawn.

“Central Victoria can be a pretty grey and dry place in summer; I wanted to create something that was very green,” he says. “Everyone said you can’t grow grass in Maldon but I wanted to prove them wrong.”

It has a Tuscan feel, Stones adds. “All the levels of brickwork have been bagged in a terracotta look.”

The resulting home is one that they are happy to return to after trips away. They spend time reading in its “sun-trap” courtyard, host yearly garden parties, and often look through Moloney’s extensive travel journals, reminiscing about their experiences.

“We’ve had some really lovely times just having a glass of wine, looking at the sunset and talking about our travels,” Stones says.

The separate cottage – named The Little Cottage (TLC for short) and made up of a living space, kitchen and bedroom with an en suite – has proven a hit with friends, family and paying guests.

“We’ve spent so much time in B&Bs around the world and said, ‘If this was ours, this is how we’d do it,’ ” Stones says. 

“After many years of threatening to do it, we are actually running our own, and it’s exactly as we would like it – lots of cute touches and we get the most amazing reviews.”

The 1100-square-metre terraced block also features a studio with its own street address. Moloney uses it as an office space for his work as a justice of the peace.

While they’ve had some “amazing times” at the home, the couple have recently decided to put it on the market, with plans to make a sea change north to Lake Macquarie in NSW.

“We don’t think it’s ever too late to try something new,” Stones says. “We’ve got a lot of years left in us and we just want to keep trying new things.”

$1,395,000 - $1,495,000

21 Boundary Road, Maldon VIC 3463

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