The only way up to the apartments on the roof at Bel-Air is via a sweeping staircase in the front garden.

Bel-Air

Berry, New South Wales

The archetypal rural Australian house is one out in the middle of nowhere, with tin roof and verandahs all the way round.

But one of the first houses I thought about for the book was at Berry, right on the Princes Highway, the main coast road between Sydney and Melbourne, the route you would have taken if you had the time on driving trips between State capitals before the Hume Highway became a dual carriageway and cheap airfares came in.

It’s also the main road between Sydney and the South Coast of New South Wales – the road everyone takes when they go on holidays to Jervis Bay, Bega, Bermagui and Ulladulla. They have to drive through Berry to get there – and the house right on the highway, the one that’s different from every house in town, from every house on the Princes Highway, from every house in Australia, is one that they remember.

A lot of people say it’s part of their childhood, says Elaine Townshend, who has owned it for the past fifteen years with her partner, James Phillips, a heritage consultant. ‘They say Berry is where they all stopped, for the doughnut van or the pie shop, and they’d often be parked in front of this house and feel quite a connection with it.’ It’s part of their country drive, as much a part as the cattle-covered hills out of Kiama, the poplar-lined entrances to small towns.

On the day we visited there was a Winnebago the size of a shipping container parked out the front for a couple of hours – time for the occupants to check out the craft shops of the town, have a coffee or a sausage roll. (Or, if they knew what they were doing, go around to Berry Sourdough Cafe, which is worth driving a few hundred miles for.) Even time to take a couple of snaps of the house through the hibiscus hedge, which was just coming into flower. People stop all day and photograph it, and some even walk onto the property and ask if they can look through the house, says Elaine Townshend, who owned Cash Palace, the fashion emporium that helped make the bottom of Oxford Street in Darlinghurst the centre of the universe in the seventies and eighties.

Sunroom at the front of the house has been made by closing in the carport.

Chair in the main bedroom, says James Phillips, ‘is sixties-ish, of dubious provenance, and was found in St Kilda’.

The couple agree to them looking through the house ‘99 per cent of the time, because most people just truly love the place’, she says. ‘But when you find people have walked up the stairs and onto the top of the building, that sort of thing, I think that’s a little bit rude and disrespectful.’

It’s the sweeping staircase she’s talking about, which goes from the garden up to the two apartments on the roof. That’s just one of the mad things about the house that’s now called Bel-Air (after the hotel in LA, which the couple had stayed in just before they saw the house). Having two apartments on the roof is another mad thing. The only way up to them is from the sweeping staircase, which wasn’t built with a handrail. With today’s occupational health and safety requirements, that had to change, given that the apartments are rented out. One, now short-term holiday accommodation, has an existing boomerang-shaped bar and mural, strangely inspired by Central Australia. It’s known as the Hermannsburg Suite, after the Namatjira-style painting retrieved by the couple from a skip and which now hangs in there. A terrazzo-tiled terrace joins the two apartments, and a balcony from one room of the second apartment is paved in fragments of wildly clashing Johnson tiles.

The house used to belong to George Borys, the local vet, who came from Ukraine as a displaced person after the Second World War. He met his wife, Mila, in Australia. She was a Czech Olympic javelin thrower. George Borys had done his training in Berlin, specialising in large animals, but it took a while for his qualifications to be recognised here. Like many European migrants, he was put to work in a menial job on the railways. James Phillips, a director at Weir Phillips Architects, thinks he may have been sent down to Berry to work, but he’s never been able to find the full story on him or, with no records at council, the house.

Once George Borys’ qualifications came through he stayed in the area – with the number of dairy farms around, he had no shortage of clients. He bought the land on the highway, designed his house and started building it in about 1956. Work on it continued into the sixties, with local farmers helping out as contra deals for their vet fees. He was known as quite a personality around town and there was talk of him building the house in the nude.

‘If you come from Ukraine, it’s summer virtually all year round here,’ says James Phillips, who remembers as a kid going to the houses of families from Europe ‘and the fathers would be wandering around in a pair of swimming trunks you’d be too embarrassed to wear, but they’d just be enjoying the climate’. He reckons that’s the story with George Borys, too. He doesn’t for a minute think he wore nothing when he built the house.

More than half a century later, the design of the house still looks futuristic, the vision of a mad scientist, and there was something of that about George Borys. He had a laboratory, built out of besser block at the back of the house, where he’d mix up medicines and potions for his clients, but that was in the sixties, before regulations came in. The long, low laboratory building is now self-contained accommodation, a small flat where James Phillips’ parents lived for a number of years.

Living room contains a mix of furniture and artefacts from different periods. White ottoman in the far corner was made by George Borys as part of the original furnishings.

When the couple first moved to the area they asked some of the old locals what they’d thought of the house when it was being built, whether they thought there was anything particularly unusual about it. ‘And they’d say no, we thought all houses were going to look like that in the future.’

The house, they say, is ‘a testament to people coming to Australia with nothing but their dreams. You come out of war-torn Europe and out of traditional building technology, come here and build whatever you like. You build the future, you don’t build yesterday. You’re harking forward to how you’re going to bring your children up.’ It was clearly a time when councils had less to say about what went up.

George Borys may have found the design of his three-bedroomed house in a book, or a European architecture journal, or he may have drawn it up himself – no one really knows. He may not have drawn it up at all, it may have ‘grown like topsy’, as James Phillips puts it. Everything about the house, he says, is ‘just slightly wrong – if the Rose Seidler House is Alpha, this is Omega.’

Buying the house fifteen years ago was completely unexpected for the couple – she had been staying with friends in Berry for a rest after cancer treatment, and stopped on the way to lunch to look at the house after seeing a ‘For Sale’ sign outside. ‘She rang me and said “I’ve found the house we’re going to buy in Berry,”’ says James Phillips. ‘That was news to me – but at that stage of your life, when you don’t know what’s going to happen to your partner, I thought, “Bugger it, let’s do it, it’s a new adventure.”’

Even for Elaine Townshend, it seemed like a mad thing to do, ‘but it’s absolutely us and a good project. I thought the garden would rejuvenate me and James would enjoy doing the house up.’

There was a lot to do in both the house and garden. The interior, they say, was painted ‘in the most disgusting colours – the kitchen was a nasty dirty lime green, the colour you get when you shake four tins of paint together’. There were garish colours throughout, which were neutralised with Barrister White paint, immediately bringing out all the house’s good features. Features such as the extraordinary brickwork – of various types and laid in different patterns and with odd niches here and there – in the living room; the trio of circular portholes at the front door; the original wall-mounted light fittings; the chamfered windows in the sunroom, which was once a carport.

A new, not very good fake timber kitchen had been installed just before the house was sold – the couple put in a new one, which, with its teal blue tiles and black benchtops, is far more in keeping with the spirit of the place. The original bathroom had leaked for years, and was damaged beyond repair – it was replaced by a new one, again, sensitive to the style of the house, but this time well waterproofed.

The kitchen has been refurbished recently, but is completely in keeping with the spirit of the house. Artwork, at right, is by John Stoddart.

Banquette, which comfortably seats ten, and table were built in by George Borys. Wall light was manufactured in the fifties in New Zealand.

While the house was jerry-built in many respects and has taken an enormous amount of money and effort just to keep weathertight – ‘Every flat-roofed house built in the sixties had waterproofing problems,’ says James Phillips – there are many aspects to it that are inspired. One is the built-in quarter-circle black Vitrolite-topped table in the dining area, which the couple consider ‘a bit of genius’ on George Borys’ part. ‘At a pinch it seats ten – four around the arc and three on each side. Having a ten-seater dining table in a 1200-square-foot house doesn’t work – by making it a banquette, it makes the space feel larger.’

Furniture in the house is a mix of different styles and vintages – pieces that came from the couple’s previous house in Darlinghurst, some from second-hand stores and junk shops. A white ottoman, bordered with black tacks, was made by George Borys. While the overarching architecture of the house is fifties, the furnishing certainly isn’t.

‘People see the fifties as a modernist and minimalist period, but it was minimalist because they didn’t have the resources to go out and layer the house to the nines,’ says James Phillips. ‘Building a house would have stretched funds, so it would often then be a matter of scrounging furniture, which could have come from the twenties and thirties.’

He mentions Sydney artist and gallery owner Thelma Clune, ‘who always used to say “Darling, is it harmonious?” That’s what you want – harmony and comfort – the mixture should always be there so that people can sit down and read a book in great comfort. If they lift their eye, they can go to something harmonious to look at, not a frightening statement, as some people have.’

The eclectic, unprecious mix within the house continues in the garden. ‘We thought the house could take a slightly wacky garden,’ says Elaine Townshend. ‘The more vibrant colours, the more appealing it would be.’ The semi-tropical garden at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles provided the first cue – and the inspiration for the hibiscus hedge, which is made up of as many colour hibiscuses as possible. The couple describe the garden style as ‘California vernacular grotesque’ – the weirder the plant, the happier they are; the stranger the juxtaposition, the better. And so there will be a banana palm next to a conifer, strelitzia alongside a yucca, lambs’ ears mixed with gymea lilies. Some have been planted by design, some by happy accident.

There was talk a couple of years ago of selling the house. ‘There are maintenance issues on a house like this and it got a bit too much for both of us,’ they say. They sold off part of the garden (which contained a madly tiled swimming pool George Borys had built) and had even put the house on the market. Negotiations with prospective buyers were so fraught, however, that they decided to stay. At various phases of their lives, the couple have tried different things and taken up new challenges. After fifteen years at Berry, they had thought it was time to do something else, says James Phillips, ‘to go off on a new adventure. But it apparently wasn’t.’

Refurbished bathroom has kept the original colour scheme; in a guest bedroom, painting of the house is by Susan Weir, the wife of James Phillips’ business partner.

The Hermannsburg Suite, one of two apartments on the roof of the house, is let out as holiday accommodation.