View across part of the vegetable garden to the new section of the house, which is built from salvaged materials.

Brierfield Farm

Bellingen, New South Wales

Architraves on the hallway door are made from joists from an old bridge. After a two-year search for one, Emma Hohnen found the Metters kitchen pantry, used for storing drygoods, in Nowra, NSW.

The Never Never River, Waterfall Way, Promised Land – the names in the Bellinger Valley on the mid North Coast of New South Wales are not the kind you find in the real world.

The area features in Peter Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda. When people are making plans to meet, they talk about the first bridge, or the second bridge, after Aniseed on the Never Never. In the subtropical lushness of it all, the saturated greens, the damp, dark shadows and the lazy streams, it’s almost too beautiful. A flight long enough from Sydney for tea and a biscuit, a short drive inland from the brick-veneered Coffs Harbour and there’s Bellingen, the sort of country town that doesn’t exist much anymore – weatherboards and loose-limbed trees, a well-used memorial hall and verandahs on the shops on the main street.

It’s also a ‘transition town’ – a place that’s moving towards complete self-sustainability in response to environmental and economic concerns. The idea of transition towns started less than ten years ago in Kinsale in Ireland, and Totnes in Devon, and has spread to communities around the world. In Bellingen, a bunch of volunteers make edible landscapes everywhere – there are fruit trees down pathways, and anyone can pick what they want. Locals help out at community gardens and take free fruit and vegetables home. One group collects, and swaps, seeds of useful heritage plants; there’s another group committed to sustainable building practices. Once a month, there’s a free market in town – you can give and take, or just give or just take.

Susan Weil first stopped in Bellingen when she was twenty, on a road trip from Sydney to Townsville, where she was starting a marine biology degree. She thought what a ‘funky town’ it was. She came back a few times over the years and, when she and partner Emma Hohnen (who also own Yorulla) decided to sell up in Sydney in 2009, it was high on their list of possible places to live. They had been tentatively looking online for a couple of years for a house – old and rambling, a Federation or Queenslander, but nothing came up.

They decided they may as well forget about it for a while and go travelling – they sold off many of their possessions, put the rest in storage and set off in a camper trailer with their daughter, Sahara, one at the time. ‘The idea was to travel until we’d had enough,’ says Susan Weil. After three months, and in Tasmania, Emma Hohnen was ready to stop moving and start looking for somewhere to settle. They flew up to see a property near Bellingen. It was beautiful, but right on the highway as you come in to the town. It didn’t seem right to move to the country and have to live with road noise.

They rented a house in the area and started looking seriously, but real estate agents showed them everything they couldn’t afford and everything they didn’t want. Buying an old house seemed impossible, and so they started searching for land – north-facing, not too far out of town, and somewhere high enough to get sea breezes.

They found it, during the second of six floods in 2009. The land, only a few minutes’ drive from Bellingen, wasn’t underwater, but it was pouring with rain the first time they saw it. There was no driveway, only a ramshackle track up through the block, which didn’t have a single tree or plant on it. There was a dilapidated shed on the lower part of the land, and an unfinished besser block house down near the gate – it was meant to be a garage with living space on top, but the ground floor was all that was completed. Altogether, it didn’t look particularly promising.

But after a waterlogged walk to the top of the barren land, the views of hills upon hills, reaching into the distance in every direction, was enough. Views towards Tarkeeth State Forest, Jaaningga Nature Reserve and Gladstone State Forest. They said they’d take it. According to the real estate agent they were the third people to buy the land and say they were going to build on it. No one ever had.

There’s something single-minded about Susan Weil – you get the feeling she would have built on it anyway, but that throwaway challenge from the real estate agent probably made her even more determined to do something with the land at Brierfield.

The land came with two cows, five chickens and a small rat-infested caravan. The couple quickly fixed things up, turning the shed on the lower part of the land into a yoga and massage studio and counselling room (Susan Weil is a counsellor; Emma Hohnen teaches yoga), the caravan into a spare bedroom for friends, and the house near the gate into their temporary place, while they began planning something for the top part of the land. (The house near the gate is now let out as short-term holiday accommodation.)

View down the corridor towards the outdoor bathroom; study, which is just inside the front door; kitchen, like the rest of the house, is made of a variety of materials; ladder towel rack in the indoor bathroom.

The new part of the house is essentially one space, incorporating living and dining areas plus kitchen. Salvaged materials were used throughout, and mismatched timber in ceilings and floors was scuffed up with steel wool and vinegar to give it an aged appearance.

Different paint colours and treatments were used for timberwork throughout the house. Items such as the crocheted blankets were picked up at op shops; a bedside table in the guest bedroom was a fridge in a previous life.

The two knew they didn’t want to live in a new house – building from scratch was beyond their budget, but more than anything they wanted to cut down on consumption and lead as ecologically sensitive a life as possible. The solution came from the next valley, where someone had just built a big new house on his land. His old weatherboard house, built in the thirties, was sitting there, rotting in the rain. It was exactly what they wanted – long and narrow so that as many rooms as possible could face north to take advantage of passive solar energy principles. The three-bedroomed house was also beautifully constructed without nails – all components slotted together like a puzzle. That made transport difficult – the house was cut in half and carefully held together as it was moved on the back of a truck from one valley to the next. It wasn’t easy getting it through the gate, it wasn’t easy getting it up the hill – nothing about building the house was simple.

The old house – which now contains four bedrooms, bathroom and a laundry – has had a living and dining area, kitchen and office added to it, designed by Susan Weil, with construction done by a bunch of talented builders used to working with hardwood. She had a rough idea of how she wanted it to look but her design was kept fairly loose and flexible, able to adapt as her ideas shifted or she happened to come across a stash of decent timber.

Ask her how she learnt to do such things and she just says she’s renovated all the houses she’s lived in, starting with a place at the beach in Sydney’s Coogee when she was twenty-five. It doesn’t really answer my question.

She’s someone who can go to a tip shop, buy a load of mismatched windows and make them work. Or she can pick up joists from an old bridge and decide they could be used as architraves for the door leading from the living area to the bedrooms. Or be looking for a cheap form of storage for the main bedroom, come across some timber shelving for Grange Hermitage and realise that’s just what she needed.

Virtually all the building materials are second-hand or rejects – and anything that isn’t has been treated to make it look old. New hall lights have been sprayed to age them – originals were far too expensive. Mismatched timber floors and ceilings from Sydney or from local hardwood timber mills in the new part of the house have been scuffed up with steel wool and vinegar, giving them a more uniformly aged look. The pair of front doors are French, bought in Sydney; the bathroom sink, which she has been dragging around for twelve years, is 300 years old and from South America.

Susan Weil went around the whole house, sanding ‘every window, every shelf – I wanted them to look rounded rather than square’. She ‘had fun with paint’ in the old part of the house, trying out different colours and then sanding them back to look aged. ‘We didn’t want a schmicko house,’ she says.

Similarly, furniture has been picked up from all over the place – from second-hand shops and tip shops, from wherever they’ve happened to come across things. Daybeds have been constructed from leftover timber and, ingeniously, an old refrigerator in the guest bedroom is used as a bedside table.

Part of a mill gate is now used in the kitchen as a rail for hanging pots. Walk-in pantry is behind louvre doors.

Bathroom sink, sitting on an old chest, is 300 years old and from South America; bedroom in the old part of the house.

Main bedroom, in the old part of the house. Grange Hermitage shelving is behind louvre doors, at left.

Outdoor bathroom, on the verandah at the end of the corridor, looks out over the surrounding valley.

A deck was built on two sides of the house, with an outdoor bathroom – the bath from a recycling centre – on the short end near the bedrooms. ‘You have to have an outdoor bathroom,’ says Susan Weil. You’re right, you think, as you have an early morning shower and watch the mists rise from the valley.

One of the most difficult parts of the build was the terracing of the hill near that outdoor bathroom – originally the land dropped off dramatically, but Susan Weil organised to have truckloads of fill brought in to level the area off. In that bank a series of agricultural pipes are connected to pipes and vents within the house; warm air from the house is cooled as it flows deep within the bank, meaning that even on the hottest day, there’s a breeze inside the house.

The couple’s aim to be environmentally friendly extends far beyond the house; corrugated iron and other materials left over from various buildings on the site were used to build chook sheds and shelter for woodpiles. Bricks from a fireplace in the old house now form the front step and pathway.

As inventive and imaginative as Susan Weil is with building houses, it’s a surprise to hear her say she wondered at the start whether buying the land was the biggest mistake of her life. She looked at it and, apart from the view, could see nothing beautiful in it. ‘It was bare, bare ground – nothing there, not even one big beautiful tree. I’m not a landscaper – I didn’t have a sense of what it could be like. I wondered what we’d done.’

A little over a year after the family have moved into their house, it’s impossible to imagine it once stood on an empty slope. Now, with biodynamic principles in place, the land sustains them in every way. Down in one corner, a reed bed system treats wastewater from the house. An orchard is planted with various types of limes, mandarins and oranges. An enormous vegetable garden feeds them year round. Chickens provide more eggs than they can possibly use themselves – they have plans to market biodynamic eggs. The garden provides more than enough for the family, the chickens, cows and, more recent acquisitions, their sheep. A whole area is set aside for pumpkins, which they swap with a local baker for bread. Susan Weil says she can spend nine hours a day in the garden and think nothing of it. ‘That’s my passion,’ she says.

Both working for themselves, the couple divide their time carefully between work, looking after Sahara, having time for themselves, for each other and for the family. They find time to go to the beach, to go into town for coffee, to ride their bikes or to walk the two-and-a-half hour loop that takes in the Never Never River.

When they moved up to Bellingen, friends in Sydney predicted they would miss the city and be back in two years. As the garden grows around them, and the new–old house settles into the landscape, there are no signs of them going anywhere.