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News.com.au
7 hours ago
- News.com.au
House of the week: Rare waterfront wonder
A one-of-a-kind Darwin home facing the Nightcliff foreshore is on the market for the first time since it was built 40 years ago. Architecturally designed by Steven Ehrlich and built by Tommy Valentine, the house sits on a 1740 sqm double block at 216 Casuarina Drive, Nightcliff, with 48.14m of coastal frontage and a pool. The home has four-bedrooms, two bathrooms, a mezzanine with library, a joyful colour scheme and an eclectic mix of furniture collected across the years, which will remain with the property. Steve Baddeley and his first wife Susan, who has sadly passed away, built the house and brought up four children in the home. Mr Baddeley said he wanted an expansive, solid home that made use of the environment and the beach across the road. 'The build was meant to take six month but it took 13,' he said. 'It was fantastic when we finally moved in. 'I must admit we have a very long room – it's the length of a cricket pitch – and walking back and forth to the kitchen from the bedroom when we first moved in, my wife and I got very sore feet.' In a recent interview, architect Steven Ehrlich said the challenge with the home was designing a tropical house using reinforced concrete. 'To take advantage of the site and the breezes and being blockwork walls, we decided we would put a big veranda around the house to shade the walls and keep the sun off the walls,' he said. 'And then essentially, what we've done is ventilate the roof space, which you can see through the timber louvres in the walls and the ridge vent. 'The eaves are actually open and when the sun heats up the air between the ceiling and the roof space, hot air rises and so it rises through the central roof vent and draws in cool air.' The home has double doors opening into a formal entryway, which sits in a cathedral-style living space the runs the length of the home with exposed rafters, roof vent and timber louvres high up on the walls. Running off one end of this space is a kitchen, laundry, bathroom and dining room. At the other end of the home there are three bedrooms with built-in robes and a master suite with ensuite. Above the bedrooms, a mezzanine level with full-height bookcases opens to a big balcony and views over the pool and the Nightcliff foreshore. The home has expansive verandas, landscaped tropical gardens, mature trees and plenty of lawns. Mr Baddeley said the home was once 'flesh-coloured' by recently received a bright makeover. 'My second wife, Dominique, and I were in Vietnam early last year,' he said. 'We were in Hanoi and we saw an old French colonial building and it was painted this (golden) colour and I said that's the colour we need to pain home. 'I'm a great believer in light and colour impacting your psyche. 'When we have breakfast sitting around the side of the house, it just changes our mood. 'You look at the sun on the (house) colour and the greenery from the garden and it makes you happy.' Mr Baddeley said developing the gardens had also been an 'act of love and interest'. 'I built a thing called a 'folly',' he said. 'It's a very English thing to have a folly, which is meant to look like a ruin. 'Mine is probably the only purpose-built built ruin in Darwin.' Mr Baddeley said some of his fondest memories in the Casuarina Drive home involved his family and entertaining. 'For many years, starting in, I think, 2002, we've had a lunch for all my friends here, about 40 of them on long trestle tables down the main room,' he said. 'We also enjoy watching the storms and the clouds and the weather. 'We watch the ships going out and the very occasional crocodile. 'One episode I can remember clearly – a few years ago as the sun was setting a dolphin or a porpoise started to leap up in the air in the rays of the setting sun, and it did it over and over about 20 times.' Mr Baddeley said he enjoyed having a front-row seat to the Nightcliff foreshore. 'People watching is one of the great pastimes we don't appreciate enough,' he said. 'We sit out in the garden having breakfast and we look at the people walking and cycling past. 'People dance on the dance floor that used to belong to old hotel, people come have parties, people get married there, my own daughter got married across the road.' Mr Baddeley said though the time had come to say goodbye to his family home, he and his wife would miss it. 'We'll both miss the house, the garden, the space, the access to the sea, the cycle path and the whole ambience of this area,' he said. 'It would be good for someone with children. 'I think it deserves children and someone who enjoys entertaining.' PROPERTY DETAILS Address: 216 Casuarina Drive, Nightcliff Bedrooms: 4 Bathrooms: 2 Carparks: 4 For sale: Via best offer closing 3pm, Aug 25
ABC News
8 hours ago
- ABC News
Developer builds smaller dwellings as Albany housing shortage grows
The population of one of Australia's fastest-growing regional cities is rising as sea changers flock to the region. But away from a coastline framed by million-dollar homes, a crisis is growing. Catherine Sawtell said four weeks ago she was staying in a house with rats under the floorboards and a possum in the roof. The university-educated 64-year-old once owned her own home in Albany, 420 kilometres south of Perth, but became homeless in about 2019 when her marriage broke down. She bounced from refuge to shelter, sleeping on couches and in share homes, eventually moving to Queensland in 2021 to stay with a friend. Ms Sawtell returned a year later to Albany, but affording a home in the coastal city on a disability pension proved impossible. "I have an excellent rental record … I'm not on any blacklists or anything like that, but I couldn't get anything." After five years homeless, a social housing provider helped Ms Sawtell secure accommodation that allowed her to start rebuilding her life. "And I bought a little second-hand car, so I'm mobile now." Her two-bedroom home is one of 12 units designed by affordable housing provider Advance Housing with people like Ms Sawtell in mind. Chief executive John Lysaught said demand for social housing had risen by 30 per cent in the past 18 months, but much of the available stock was unfit for purpose. He said fewer than 6 per cent of development approvals in the past five years were for one and two-bedroom homes, but almost 90 per cent of people on the social housing waiting list were seeking smaller dwellings. "For pure social housing, there's over 750 eligible tenancies on the waitlist for the Great Southern, and over 570 of those are in Albany," Mr Lysaught said. Albany has become the fastest-growing regional centre in Western Australia and the fourth-fastest nationally, according to a recent report by the Regional Australia Institute. It found the region, with a population of about 50,000, experienced a 200 per cent rise in internal migration in the 12 months to December. Support services fear the increasing population will worsen the housing crisis. "It seems to be getting worse if anything," Southern Aboriginal Corporation deputy chief executive Oscar Colbung said. "Demand has increased so much that there's virtually nothing available more broadly." WA Housing Minister John Carey said the government was working with community housing providers to deliver more social and affordable housing across the state, targeted towards seniors and those with disabilities. Mr Lysaught's plans for Albany included 36 and 51-unit developments, but getting ahead of the shortage was an ongoing struggle. "There's lots being done about it, both by government and by community providers, but it's going to take some time to try and catch up."
ABC News
9 hours ago
- ABC News
Coloured wool from Polwarth sheep popular with crafters around the world
In 1971, Wendy Dennis had an epiphany while under the shower. "I thought, 'Why don't I breed coloured sheep?' Because it's already got a colour, you don't have to dye it, no chemicals. Breed them." Wendy was newly married to a farmer in south-west Victoria and the global resurgence in home crafts such as spinning and knitting natural fibres was just beginning. Up until that time, most "coloured sheep", namely anything with not entirely white wool, usually ended up on the dinner table. "So I rescued a few coloured sheep out of the 'killer' paddock, [where they were] ready for Sunday lunch," Wendy, now 83, recalled. Wendy's husband Dave remembered the moment. "People are starting to spin coloured wool," Wendy told him. "'I'm going to have those killers. You can't kill them,'" Dave Dennis recalled her saying. And so a unique flock was born where the recessive dark wool gene replaced the dominant white wool one. "There are so many different colours. There are all the blacks and greys then there's the browns and fawns," Wendy said. In the half century since the flock began the Dennis family's wool has been sent to craft enthusiasts around the world to be fashioned into all manner of things. The wool is keenly sought after because the sheep are the Polwarth breed which produces a unique fleece. "Australia's first breed of sheep and it all started with the Dennises in 1880," Wendy said. In that year Richard Dennis launched the breed, named after the local electorate. It was the result of the cold, damp climate causing fleece rot in the dense wool of their merino flock. "That bit about water collecting in the fleece and not being able to expel was problematic and so that's the problem they sought to fix by crossing it with the Lincoln," Wendy's son Tom said. "So it's three-quarter merino, one quarter Lincoln, bred to a fixed type called a Polwarth, originally [named] a Dennis Comeback, later called a Polwarth," Wendy added. The Lincoln's long greasy wool gave the Polwarth the ability to cope with wetter, colder climates. By the early 1900s the breed was rapidly spreading throughout southern Australia and being exported to high rainfall countries, especially in South America, even to the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean. Polwarths peaked in Australia at about 8 million in the 1960s. By then they accounted for more than half the sheep in Tasmania. At the recent Australian Sheep and Wool Show in Bendigo, Tasmanian producer Wayne Walker shipped his prized Polwarths across Bass Strait and took out the major prizes in their class. But the number of entries was well down. "It's a a bit tough for a lot of people to get here and the costs are getting dearer and nothing is getting easier," Wayne said. In recent decades Polwarth numbers have rapidly declined because of advances in the merino breed. But breeders such as Greg Potter and his daughter Samantha believe the breed's distinctive wool has a unique and important role in the natural fibres' market. "People love the single source Polwarth," Samantha Potter said. "Being a longer, straighter, more aligned fibre it makes the wool easier to peel out and spin," Greg added. Their wool is sold directly to the wool craft market, including to the Dennis family, and processed and spun locally into yarn. Isabel Renters, who with her husband Nick operates a carding and spinning mill near Ballarat, says there is growing consumer demand for natural, sustainable fibre products. "All looking for natural products where they know it's sustainable, it's ethical, traceable," Isabel said. Natural coloured wool, free from chemical dye is also gaining favour, especially among wool crafters. "It's just a dream come true because it's got a good crimp, which makes it a little more elastic and it's got a demi-lustre from the Lincoln which makes it shine a tiny bit and it's so soft from the merinos," Wendy Dennis said. Tom Dennis is the fifth generation of his family to grow Polwarths and continue a sheep bloodline that stretches back to the family's merinos, shipped from Tasmania to Victoria in 1840. Drawing on the family's large archives, Tom is setting up a mini museum on the property to better tell the Polwarth story. It will showcase the passion, foresight and innovation that created the breed in 1880. But more importantly, it will cater for the present. "We need to make sure we've got woollen yarn in front of people that appreciate, Australian-grown, Australian processed, good ethical standards," Tom said. "And those sorts of values that people want to buy into when they're purchasing yarn."
