Stunning Tallarook farmhouse has a creative lineage

When architect Sally Draper and interior designer Sonia Simpfendorfer of the venerable Nexus Designs collaborated on the renovation of a Tallarook farmhouse they were so enamoured with the original ’70s fabric that they took the line of maximum restraint and respect.

“We all had the feeling that we were dealing with something really special here,” says Simpfendorfer. “The original detailing was so special that we couldn’t be too city, too whimpy or too cute.

“We just wanted to keep consistent and flow with the quality that was existing.”

In fact, so impressed were they by the house designed by the still-working, 93-year-old architect Neil Clerehan, that they talked the clients out of revamping two bathrooms. “One with simple white tiles and the other with these beautiful mosaic tiles. We kept them just as they were,” she says. “The joinery and the simple finishes still looked really good.”

Draper concurs. “The bulk of the original house was absolutely beautiful, exactly what you’d expect from Neil Clerehan,”she says. There was one uncharacteristic wing with a flat roof had unprepossessing aluminium-framed windows which Draper believes resulted from a later renovation.

Being visually hemmed in by walls, an ugly pool fence and an outbuilding, this living area had a particularly poor relationship to a pretty valley situation and the clients put that amendment near the top of their wish list.

“We didn’t extend the footprint,” says Draper. “But we did remove the walls to open the wing up which means that you can now look right through the building to the river and the billabong beyond. We gutted the wing and melded our new detailing to Neil’s original work.”

Draper also introduced two new fireplaces: One is in what Simpfendorfer says is the snug winter living room that she appointed with red upholstered sofas and armchairs to match an existing artwork.

The other is a double-sided chimney breast. As a freestanding pillar it has a sit-upon high concrete hearth and divides the dining/kitchen from the second living room with the grey leather sofas and the pink and orange scatter cushions.

“We wanted nothing about the house to feel precious,” Draper says. “Like the pergolas, the big fireplaces have the effect of anchoring the house.”

Like the other new moves, those fireplaces might have been there for 40-something years.

With Nexus doing the joinery and fully reappointing the kitchen, always on a practical note – “everything is functional” – the house is required to cope with farmers coming inside with muddy clothes and needing to feel that they can sit on sofas without being scolded. The custom-made kitchen table is made to be similarly bombproof.

Where there is a hint of contemporary sophistication is in the lovely Spanish dining chairs Simpfendorfer calls “quality and contemporary” and that have a ’70s intimation about them.

Any country house worth its title needs a mud room and this ground-hugging building that is now reflective of a three-handed collaboration across more than four decades, has one to covet.

Simpfendorfer says had she not been able to find the deep concrete trough as an off-the-shelf product, she would have had it made. The timber cupboards are there to store all the equipment the owners use in their constant entertainments, and the timber shelves, made to match the original joinery in other parts of the house, are there so people can sit and peel off their boots.

The red hooks carry through the red theme of some of the furnishings. The single spotlight honours Clerehan’s original lighting, and the round mirror is just like an original in the unaltered bathroom.

Would Neil have appreciated what the girls have done? We found him in the office and asked. As he opened up the photographic package on his computer he gasped in delight.

“Oh. Isn’t it beaut!” he exclaimed.

The much younger architect and interior designer could only be happy with such a quick and positive critique from one of Australia’s living architectural legends.

nexusdesigns.com.au

sallydraperarchitects.com.au