Why David and Yuge Bromley fell in love with their modernist Tooborac home 'at first sight'

• Owners: David and Yuge Bromley
• Type of property: A modernist house nestled into a rural landscape.
• Address: 215 Tooborac Baynton Road, Tooborac, Victoria
• Price guide: $2 million-$2.2 million

A “fluke” led creative couple David and Yuge Bromley to their modernist house in Tooborac.

David, a renowned artist, and Yuge, a designer, were driving home from Brisbane when they happened across the small town, around 100 kilometres north of Melbourne.

“Usually we would drive back from Brisbane to Melbourne but this time around we said, ‘Let’s drive home to Daylesford,’” Yuge recalls. 

“We were driving along this road, we’ve got an hour to go before we get home, and all of a sudden, these big outcrops of granite boulders just started appearing.”

Despite having driven “all around Australia”, neither of them had seen anything like it before. Captivated by the landscape, they pulled over.

“I saw it as the most beautiful place to paint and the most beautiful place to photograph,” David says.

While he took photos, Yuge – with limited phone reception – turned to Google to find out where they were. 

“The next thing I did was Google ‘Tooborac real estate’ and this property was on the market,” she says. “I started screaming to David out the window, saying, ‘I just found something amazing!’”

In a move she says is “completely not me”, she drove straight to the address on the listing and knocked on the door. Architect and then-owner David Maughan answered and invited them in for a tour and a cup of tea.

“Within an hour we had a deal done and we were buying the place,” Yuge says. “It was a love-at-first-sight thing.”

The house was designed by Maughan – who once worked under modernist architect Robin Boyd – in the early ’80s for Lady Marigold Southey. He later bought the property from her, living in it with his wife Helen for three decades.

The triple-brick home, which sits on 32 hectares, is nestled into the landscape, with most rooms arranged in a semi-circle and facing north towards a manicured garden.

“It’s so enveloping,” David says. “I’m the sort of person who would’ve loved to have been a bear and got in a big cave and slept out the winter.”

Yuge adds that, “even on the coldest of days, you just feel really protected – it feels like you’re really nestled in this place”.

Since they bought it in late 2018, the two have slowly made changes to enhance the home’s modernist aesthetic, renovating one of the three bathrooms, adding colourful blinds, and scouring shops and auction houses for modernist light fittings. 

They’ve also fitted it out with designer furniture and art. Some of their favourite pieces are works by Kirsty Budge, Charles Blackman, Michael Johnson and Roy Lichtenstein, a “wacky” collection of Memphis furniture, and two samurai swordsman sculptures.

“A lot of the artworks there are some of our absolute favourite things because we had always thought we’d be living there full time at some stage in our lives,” Yuge says.

David’s sculptures are also dotted throughout the home and outside, where they’ve added a swimming pool, a timber deck, tropical trees and some additional boulders.

With their home base and art studio in Daylesford, the family – including four children ranging in age from four to 17 – spend holidays in Tooborac, enjoying the slower pace and the opportunity to “come back together”.

“When you’re there, it’s almost mandatory that you sort of just quieten yourself,” says Yuge, who loves “pottering in the garden” and cooking.

While the couple initially imagined settling down there one day and having a “lovely, quiet life”, their busy lifestyle has seen them spend less and less time there, prompting them to put it on the market.

“I never wanted to part with it but I looked at it and went, ‘It’s such a shame that people don’t live in there more often because it’s such a beautiful home,’” Yuge says.

The couple are also in the process of selling the Old Castlemaine Goal, which they bought around the same time and have converted into the Bromley Collection Museum.

“One of the things that we really love is the process of transforming places and that sense of putting our spin on something,” Yuge says. 

“Once it’s done, we almost feel like our job there is done … we kind of go, ‘Okay, what’s next?’”

SOLD - $1,825,000

215 Tooborac Baynton Road, Tooborac VIC 3522

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