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With a background in antique furniture conservation and restoration, the owner of this home was keen to use natural building materials wherever possible.
So it makes sense that almost every room inside the family’s Chillingham property — about two hours south from Brisbane — is covered from top to toe in locally sourced blackbutt timber.
Homeowners Jake and Danya purchased the 40-acre-block in 2015 from the original owner-builder, who used reclaimed building materials and timber harvested on-site in the 1970s to create a rustic abode, surrounded by bushland.
‘The house itself had strong bones, but years of add-ons and alterations had left behind a patchwork of mismatched details throughout,’ All Build Project Management co-founder and design lead Charles Schulz says, whose team brought the owner’s vision to life.
‘The whole place was like a treehouse. It had a tree trunk staircase right in the middle of it.’
This hand-crafted charm was to be preserved in the renovation, while also updating the house’s functional elements, including the kitchen, bathrooms, insulation and connection to the outdoors.
Using the existing mezzanine levels as their spring board, All Build Project Management carefully reconfigured the new floo plan to spill out across four levels — capturing views from every angle.
‘It’s always really important to improve on existing framework before adding,’ Charles says. ‘We worked on providing easier access to outside and better cross ventilation, which automatically allowed for newer site lines within the building and views to the landscape and surrounding hills.’
Details like recycled 1920s stained-glass windows were carefully restored and retained, alongside exposed triangulated framing and pine French doors. A custom stain was also created for the kitchen joinery, which reveals a dark contrast to the seamless blackbutt VJ panels.
A big part of the brief was to avoid plasterboard at all costs: ‘We wanted the whole house timber, including all the wall linings, the floors, the ceilings and the doors,’ Danya adds.
‘We love watching the change in the tones of the timber as the sunlight hits it at different points in the day, especially the soft golden glow at the end of the day.’
Nostalgic references — including Danya’s obsession with the family log cabin from the 1970s TV show Little House on the Prairie — also influenced the finished interiors.
Each room almost feels like a cocoon, as the living area remains at the heart of the home, where a central fireplace awaits. Externally, the dark cladding helps the home blend into the lush surroundings, where hundreds of new trees have been planted.
Between the serene, sub-tropical location and the striking design, the enchanting house now looks like something straight out of a fairytale.
And while new, safer stairs, have been installed, they even kept the tree trunk inside!
